


pick me up and turn me round (vol. 2)

by lamphouse



Series: so bourgeoisie to keep waiting [4]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Affection, Couch Cuddles, Cuddling & Snuggling, Death by Affection, Drunken Confessions, Eddie Kaspbrak Gets Divorced, Eloping, First Time, Flirting as Chirping, Footnotes, Friendship, Getting Together, Grocery Shopping, Hair Washing, Honeymoon, IN. THAT. ORDER., Intimacy, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Meeting the Parents, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Self-esteem Issues, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Canon, References to Depression, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Star Wars References, compliments, mild psychic abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24726673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamphouse/pseuds/lamphouse
Summary: Richie has spent so long building himself a stunt double out of mud and Ticketmaster pay stubs, pointing everyone to the dummy while he stood behind the curtain and let the light bounce off something else; to have that gaze turned on Richie himself, regular ol' Richie, should feel like an existential threat, and itdoesexcept for the fact that it's Eddie's gaze. It's Eddie, which means it's impossible until it isn't. It's terrifying up until the very point where it becomes the easiest thing in the world.Five times being known was a mortifying ordeal for Richie and one time it was as natural as breathing.(companion)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Maggie Tozier & Richie Tozier & Wentworth Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: so bourgeoisie to keep waiting [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582396
Comments: 26
Kudos: 115





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [make it up as we go along (vol. 1)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24397549) by [lamphouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamphouse/pseuds/lamphouse). 



> housekeeping:
> 
> if you're on mobile turn the work skin off! on desktop it fixes the width on the epigraph, but mobile does it anyway
> 
> footnotes are linked! click the in-text number and it'll take you down to the one at the end & vice versa
> 
> the first volume (linked above, below, etc) takes place along the same rough timeline as this & is being posted concurrently, so subscribe to both.

**I.** June

_Don't be surprised if I love you  
For all that you are  
I couldn't help it  
It's all your fault_

Alanis Morissette, "Head Over Feet"  
  
---  
  
Let the record show that, after forty years on this Earth, Richie Tozier is finally, truly happy. He knows, he knows, he was surprised too. But all it took was the recovery of every traumatic memory pre-age eighteen, a bizarre boss battle with an eldritch sewer monster, and the implosion of his life and as he knew it, with all the cross-country moves and four hundred daily emails that entails.[1]

A more than fair trade, in Richie's opinion, and one gladly made because it got him here: trailing the one and only Eddie Kaspbrak through a New York Trader Joe's at two in the afternoon on a Friday—with Eddie in general. Maybe it's his self-sacrificial tendencies at their worst, but Richie thinks any second of time with Eddie would be worth all of that, like every visceral fear he remembers pays for a new thing Richie gets to learn about adult Eddie at a one-to-one exchange rate.

Eddie actually likes doing errands. That's one of the things. He actually makes grocery lists and shit, which Richie probably could've told you anyway, but he definitely didn't imagine the kind of quiet joy that comes from following Eddie around Trader Joe's, folded over a cart full of fairtrade whatevers. He doesn't even care that it's kitty-corner from the super bougie ice cream place that has a killer chocolate/peanut butter/Oreo combo with a stupid name that Eddie rolls his eyes at, or that whenever Richie remembers something incredibly boring like the right brand of paper towels Eddie looks up and down the aisle before kissing him quickly and firmly. Just buying groceries with the love of his life is suddenly the most amazing part of Richie's life now. Sunday kind of love.

He can see the headlines now: _Richie Tozier's new focus: his mid-life crisis_.

In his defense, though, of the two people in this relationship, he's far from the worst offender. Eddie has leaned fully into this whole "new lease on life" thing in his hyperbolically Eddie way. He's taken up running the manic intensity he does everything he thinks he's not supposed to do (training for a marathon in the spring, which Richie thinks is genuinely insane but won't say a word about lest Eddie stop wearing weirdly tight, wicking shirts and those _shorts_ ) and eating everything he thought he couldn't ("And you know, I don't think I was ever allergic to chocolate, I think she just said that so I wouldn't eat her fucking Cosmic Brownies.") and generally eating up the ground beneath him like one of those machines that tears up asphalt like so much ice cream softened Oreo.

Meanwhile, not much has changed for Richie. Okay, everything has changed, but the day to day shit stays the same, just... better when modified to include another person. Richie still spends his whole afternoons in bed, slouched up against the headboard and mindlessly digging his way through the idiot populations of a rota of social media, but now it's with Eddie, man of his dreams, lying between his legs with his head on Richie's stomach as he verbally eviscerates whatever Richie has read out to him.

Look, like: the other day Eddie had been spiraling about the divorce in a way that never became any less painful to watch so Richie had set him in his car with Richie's "Songs to Cathartically Scream in the Car" playlist. This is not entirely out of character for Eddie, whose road rage is as impressive as his driving skills; it's when, forty minutes later, he emerges to pin Richie to the wall and show him how much he appreciated it that's the new behavior in question. Now whenever Eddie hums the Ting Tings to himself with his eyes shut to calm down it has the unintended side effect of making Richie both incredibly fond and turned on, but it's worth it to know he's helping Eddie learn to let loose at least a little.

He's just such a beautiful little terror, and he's set his demolition sights on Richie. Richie has had a fair number of moments where he's felt extraordinarily, unsettlingly lucky, but this one takes the cake.

Currently, though, Richie is a mere spectator, as Eddie's attention is on the soy sauce selection at said grocery store, which he is examining with all the seriousness and vigor of the New England Journal of Medicine editorial board. As fascinating as it is to watch him mentally (and sometimes verbally) debate the merits of various brands, scientific studies, and federal regulatory agencies, Richie has been thinking about that ice cream since Eddie had mentioned running out of quinoa[2] three days ago.

"I don't know," Eddie says after longer than any regular person could stand to think about soy sauce, "cuz there's MSG to worry about too—"

"Alight, buddy, I'm gonna have to cut you off there," Richie says, nudging the cart forwards for emphasis. "I know you know MSG poisoning is made up to excuse people being racist and can't kill you."

Eddie gives him a look. "Of course I know that, I—"

After a quick glance up and down the empty aisle, Richie takes Eddie's face in his hands and makes him look at him, even as he rolls his eyes. "Say it with me."

"MSG poisoning is made up by racists and can't kill me," Eddie deadpans.

"Thank you." With a solemn and barely-there kiss to his forehead, Richie moves his hands to Eddie's shoulders and physically turns him back to the shelf. "So, soy sauce. Pick one. Literally any one."

"There isn't even MSG in soy sauce, I was just pointing out we should get the 'less sodium' before you have a heart attack."

"Alright." Little green bottle instead of red. "And I'm pretty sure there is, but it still doesn't matter."

"Wait, wh—"

He reaches for the cart but Richie dodges, rolling away up the aisle saying, "Nope nope nope."

Richie likes this part a lot: the smooth, telepathic double act. Loving Eddie is so much fun. The other day Bev beeped him for something and Richie mimed zipping his mouth shut and throwing the key over his shoulder, where Eddie then automatically caught and swallowed it like Houdini. Neither the dismay on Bill's face nor Bev's cackling could hold a candle to the incandescent joy he felt when he turned and immediately locked onto Eddie's smug little smile.

Turns out they're, like, _really_ good at being in love.

They continue down the aisles like this, Richie randomly grabbing whatever catches his eye, Eddie not even half a step behind stomping forward trying to catch the heels of Richie's shoes. They're like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, if Fred never knew what to do with his hands and Ginger had strong opinions about produce storage. Every so often they'll stop for something they actually need and Eddie will stop just shy of walking into Richie's back and they'll look at each other with secret little grins before launching into another great debate about pasta shapes or whatever the fuck.

"You are a _child_ ," Eddie says, dropping the box of bunny-shaped macaroni and cheese in the cart anyway.

"You love gimmicky mac n cheese, don't lie."

"Seriously, a toddler." He's still not arguing, and when Richie raises his eyebrows at him to show he noticed, he shakes his head. "Besides, you know how to make it yourself, I've seen you do it."

Richie picks up the box and shakes it in his face. " _Bunnies_ , Eddie."

"A _child_ , Richie."

Eddie knocks the box back into the cart with a twitch of a smile and they roll on again.

"You know, one of these days you're gonna give me a backhanded compliment about my cooking skills," Richie continues, "and I'm gonna take it to heart and you're gonna be eating my soggy crust pizza for the rest of time."

"I find it hard to believe your big head could get even bigger."

There aren't many other people grocery shopping on a Friday afternoon, oddly enough, so the only sound in the aisle is the faint eighties mix coming over the PA, distant shoes on the tile, and their own banter. It's weirdly private for a public place, though Richie still feels the persistent buzz of anxiety that goes with the territory of being a closeted D-list celebrity.

Eddie glances back when Richie doesn't volley back immediately, their rhythm thrown off momentarily. "You don't need the encouragement," he tries again. It only comes out sort of like a question.

"Eddie my darling, encouragement is all I ever need. Every little thing you say goes into my soft, squishy heart where I will internalize it forever." Too sincere, but Eddie's expression is half skeptical, half adoring, so Richie leans even further over the cart handle to smile dopily back at him. "I'm a Pisces, babe, what did you expect."

"What the fuck does that even mean?"

"Pisceses are sensitive, selfless, and incredibly talented," Richie recites.

"That is... complete bullshit," Eddie's mouth says, but his voice and his eyes say, _you know what, that's fair_ , which feels like someone's driven an acupuncturist pin right into the meat of Richie's aforementioned soft, squishy heart: like a bug specimen, or a voodoo doll.

Far too much for the cereal aisle, so Richie slips back into joke mode and shakes his head morosely. "Such a Sagittarius."

"I don't know what that means but based on how you said it: fuck you."

"Britney Spears is a Sagittarius," Richie adds helpfully. "And Taylor Swift."

To the box of organic pancake mix in his hand, Eddie asks, "Why do you know that?"

"I'm a genius." And he has mild insomnia at the best of times (even before the trauma nightmares) and access to Wikipedia. "Famous Pisceses include Kurt Cobain and Rihanna."

That makes Eddie look up, so Richie plasters on his most innocent face before the tidal wave comes.

"How the fuck is that fair."

"How's what—"

"You get Kurt Cobain and I get fucking Taylor Swift?"

"You love that one song, about the car crash," Richie points out, again, being very helpful here, even though Eddie smacks his arm. "And the one about being a bullied twelve year old in a small town."

Eddie smacks him again, a smile breaking loose from his disappointed pursed lips thing. "I _was_ a bullied twelve year old in a small town, asshole. I'm allowed some fucking catharsis, and if it comes from a Taylor Swift song that's nobody's business."

Richie, who cried without knowing why when his niece played him "Long Live" on a Hello Kitty boombox, raises his hands defensively. "Preaching to the choir, Eds."

"Good." He nods once and pulls the list out of his pocket. "Okay, all that's left is mouthwash, yogurt, and bread."

Richie gasps. "Eddie Eddie Bo-Beddie, say it ain't _so_. On opposite ends of the store? What happened to your carefully calibrated route?"

"What happened was your sudden craving for coconut butter crackers," Eddie says, "which distracted us before we got to the dental care section."

Ah, yes, but they're good crackers. Buttery and sweet with just a bit of a hard glaze. Eddie loves crackers, he eats them like an insane person, either shoving each one in his mouth whole or taking the tiniest bites possible, which always ends up with at least a quarter of each cracker in crumbs all over himself. This is another thing Richie gets to know now.

" _Our_ sudden craving for coconut butter crackers." Richie quickly squishes his cheek and swings the cart past Eddie. "No worries, gorgeous, I'll get you your mint juice. When we get home, though, definitely wanna continue this conversation about dental care, hoo baby."

Eddie tries to hit him with the notepad but he only glances the back of his shoulder and Richie catches him laughing to himself as he rolls away. He's got his coconut butter crackers, he's got his bunny mac, and now he's gonna go grab some mouthwash for his man. Richie Tozier is absolutely killing it.

When he finally gives up and takes both Spearmint and Super Spearmint to the dairy section so Eddie can decide for himself, the man in question is nowhere to be found. Just rows and rows of shiny happy yogurt tops.

Then he's somewhere to be found: one aisle over, considering the ice cream wall. It's a wonderful sight: Eddie, arms folded defiantly in the face of American surplus, biceps bisected by the sleeve of his t-shirt, the dollar-fifty sunglasses Richie bought him before leaving Derry the last time on his head. Just one man and his newfound love of lactose against the world.[3]

"Well well well..." Richie parks the cart and leans over enough that he can feel Eddie's shoulder pressing back into his arm, the amount of space between their cheeks not quite plausibly deniable. "If it isn't Mister Minty Fresh himself."

Eddie hums, a back-of-the-throat sound Richie feels in his toes. He's way too old to be randomly popping boners in grocery stores, but really, isn't everyone?

He untangles his arms to reveal three yogurts held neatly in his palm in a disorientingly hot display of competence. "Orange creamsicle."

"Excellent," Richie says in his best _Bill & Ted_, with matching hang loose gesture, before taking them (less competently) and dropping them in the cart. He sees Eddie turn to look at him a half second later, a suggestion of motion in the corner of Richie's eye, and he might be— No, based on the warm pins and needles he's feeling on the side of his face, Eddie's definitely smiling at him, though said look is quickly stifled when Richie looks up again.

"So," Eddie turns back to the freezer, "regular dairy free, or do we wanna go sorbet this time?"

Richie knows it's an at least semi-facetious royal we, but it does make his heart pitter patter briefly before going all in when he actually processes the statement. "You can get real ice cream if you want, I don't give a shit. Hell, I'll still probably eat it no matter what, so."

"What?" Eddie asks like he didn't hear, but his eyebrows tip toward concern when his eyes catch Richie's. "Why the fuck would we get something you can't even eat?"

That should not be as romantic as Richie's traitorous heart seems to have decided it is.

"Richie Tozier." By the sound of his voice, Eddie seems to have noticed said treason.

"...Yeah."

"What kind of non-cream ice cream do you want."

Richie can't answer, because there's a chunk of his heart in his throat. The narrow gap between them filled with a profound intimacy, amplified by the bare, unforgiving grocery store light. It feels like Eddie's gaze is flaying him open, but soothingly so, like peeling dried glue off his hands the way they all did as kids.

"Raspberry," he manages to get out, trying not to listen to the lyrics over Phil Collins's tinny drum machine bouncing around the store as Eddie gives him a knowing look. Raspberry, sure. Beautiful and tart, not that that means anything more significant.

Also good with a moderate amount of vodka in it, and _that_ one is intentional.

Eddie tilts his head like a sarcastic _thank you_ and sets a pint of the raspberry and a pint of (equally dairy free) peanut butter fudge in the baby seat of the cart. He does it with his far hand, twisting so that they're facing each other, chest to chest, Eddie wedged between Richie and the freezer. He stays there when he's done, doing his little emotional RoboCop scan, and Richie looks back as blankly as possible.

"Raspberry," Eddie confirms. Then, he squeezes Richie's elbow and slides away with the cart.

The serious mood dissipates, making Richie feel simultaneously like he's dodged a bullet and like he's glowing from the inside out. The only sign of any change is how Richie, stumbling, accidentally catches the heel of Eddie's shoe, but even then nothing comes of it. For all intents and purposes, Richie is not lit up like a newly superpowered nuclear waste victim. No one can see his heart Care Bear Staring straight at Eddie's head. Everything's fine.

When they stop for bread, Eddie cranes over the basket to check out Richie's mouthwash selection(s) and huffs a laugh through his nose before his eye snags on something.

"Oh shit, dinosaur sandwich cutters?"

He looks like a kid on Christmas as he snatches them out of the cart, which is exactly the reaction Richie was going for. Richie leans over the cart handle and props his chin in his hands. He looks like a ridiculous, lovesick idiot, but he _is_ a ridiculous, lovesick idiot, and more importantly Eddie's the only one here to see it and he already knows.

While Eddie checks it over for BPA warnings or whatever the fuck like Richie knew he would, Richie says, "There was another one that's two dolphins and in the middle it made a heart."

"Kay, and that's cute? But dinosaurs kick ass, so." Eddie drops it back in the cart definitively.

The moment is good, so Richie decides to seize it and ask slyly, "So... if we're buying ice cream, does that mean no Milkjam?"

Eddie gives him the _are you stupid_ look: a favorite actor in his broad repertoire, because Eddie has as many Faces as Richie does Voices. They truly are made for each other.

"Why do you think I wait for you to come grocery shopping with me if not to justify eating overpriced ice cream in the middle of the day?"

And because Richie loves him he doesn't mention any of the times he's found those little plastic spoons in the recycling or the cupholders in Eddie's car, just lightly bumps Eddie with the cart and steers away before he gets paid back.[4]

"Yes! Ridin' Duuurty time."

"Sometimes I think you only ever get that flavor because you like saying the name," Eddie says to the multigrain whatever in his hand. He's definitely smiling, though, the bastard, because he also thinks it's funny so _ha_.

"Also it's chocolate and peanut butter," Richie shrugs. "I am but a mere mortal, Eds."

After a second's contemplation, Eddie adds. "I want the coffee and Hennessy one."

"Hell yeah, like Beyoncé." Then, as flatly as possible, he adds, "He love the way it tastes, that's his recipe."

"You are _way_ too white for that," Eddie points out as Richie simply shrugs again, "never say any of those words ever again." He pauses. "I did like the part where I'm Beyoncé, though."

"That was the whole thing!" Richie argues, but he's grinning too much for it to sound even the slightest bit contrary. "Wait, do we have—?"

Eddie grabs a plastic bottle out of the cart and tosses it at him, much to Richie's flailing. "Lactaid, baby."

"You." Richie points directly at Eddie's proud smile. "You're the only motherfucker in this city who can handle me."

And because Eddie is the actual comedian in this relationship, he raises one eyebrow, still smiling, and knocks his sunglasses back onto his nose, like he's Tom Cruise or some shit. The worst part, of course, is that it works. Knees weak, arms et cetera.

But even then his eyes are boring into Richie's through the glasses, brighter and more revealing than any spotlight he's ever talked his way into. It's... honestly scary. Richie has spent so long building himself a stunt double out of mud and Ticketmaster pay stubs, pointing everyone to the dummy while he stood behind the curtain and let the light bounce off something else; to have that gaze turned on Richie himself, regular ol' Richie, should feel like an existential threat, and it _does_ except for the fact that it's Eddie's gaze. It's Eddie, which means it's impossible until it isn't. It's terrifying up until the very point where it becomes the easiest thing in the world.

Then, as if to further cement his status as Richie's total fucking soulmate, he adds, "And while we're at it maybe we'll have dino shaped grilled cheese at home?"

Richie's whole body tilts back, groaning and grinning with equal intensity. When he straightens ( _ha_ ), he drops a smacking kiss on Eddie's forehead and says, "Ugh, babe! Don't even trip."

Later in the parking lot, Eddie pulls him into a long, sweet kiss against the side of the car, his hand on the back of Richie's neck like he knows it's exactly what Richie's been thinking about for the past hour. For a second, Richie thinks maybe he does.

* * *

1 One of the things that makes it so easy is that Eddie is doing all of this too. Alright, Chicago to New York is further than Long Island to Lower Manhattan, but he gets the same kind of emails from his ex-wife and and the divorce lawyer he first contacted frankly an unconscionably long time ago as Richie does from his manager, so they get to sit at the counter and trade crazy lines from their inboxes (which helps) and then make out (which helps even more).

2 Richie Tozier is now someone who eats quinoa, and what's worse is he likes it—and not only because Eddie always looks secretly pleased when he does. It's actually pretty good if you put, like, a shit ton of butter on it.

3 The fact that Eddie isn't lactose intolerant but Richie _is_ is just another example of the universe's sense of humor, which quite frankly Richie is tired of but, hey, he knows from experience it could be infinitely worse.

4 Okay, first he takes a moment to flip through the mental folder of all the childhood memories of Eddie spending his little allowance buying them both ice cream or popsicles or popcorn or whatever—two of everything or (when funds prohibited) one passed back and forth between them wordlessly, this unspoken understanding that if Eddie was going to have something Richie would too, and vice versa—but that quickly makes him way too emotional for a Trader Joe's at eleven in the morning, so he pulls himself together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey gang, long time no see. I'm sure a glance at the posting date on the first fic has answered most questions, but suffice to say I live in minneapolis so... and I felt guilty about still posting but then I realized we all need a break at times & I myself am getting pretty burnt out already so I thought if this helps one person it's worth it
> 
> but here is the richie half! I've been working on this fic when not helping out the irl folks (really a nightmare scenario for us respiratorily afflicted rn) & it's nearly done. so that's something to look forward to ig
> 
> speaking of minneapolis: milkjam is a real place & ridin' duuurty [sic] is good but not as good as thai tea. dino sandwich cutters are real and months after I wrote this I ran across [this](https://lamphous.tumblr.com/post/615770679331176448) on tumblr which is basically a summary of this chapter. richie's imagined headline is ALSO real, from a 1983 issue of _us_ , and it's about george lucas


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reminder again mobile people turn the work skin OFF desktop people turn it ON

**II.** July

_I'll be his and he'll be mine.  
We'll love until the end of time  
And we'll never be lonely anymore._

The Dixie Cups, "Chapel of Love"  
  
---  
  
For the millionth time, Richie stands in the doorway of a Kaspbrak House, feeling like he's doing something wrong just by breathing.

He never thought he'd do this again. He'd been totally ready to sit in the car for twenty minutes while Eddie ransacked his marital home, ready to let him do this on his own, he gets it, but then Eddie had tapped on his window and Richie blinked and there he was. The place where he lived every day Richie had no idea who he was outside of confusing Nyquil dreams. Eddie's home.

Even without the déjà vu, something's off about the place. It's too... tasteful. Neat, like a museum or a showhouse. He's half-expecting to be jumped by a chipper stepmom with a plate of Pepperidge Farm soft bakes and a pantsuit shellacked with decades of hairspray the second they walk in. It feels impossible that Eddie, whose very being left craters in Richie's mind that could never be filled, could live here without leaving a mark.

But Eddie knows it like the back of his hand and flits from room to room collecting things in his little metrosexual messenger bag, Richie trailing like a particularly useless puppy. At least he's talking the entire time, but while the steady stream of sound would normally be a sign of nerves, it lacks that anxious tenor, which freaks Richie out even more than the ceramic bunnies over the fireplace (which says a lot). It's suddenly frighteningly easy to see Eddie here. A version of him that existed once, grown into his mold like those Buddha-shaped pears. Not the Eddie whose death grip on Richie's wrist on the sidewalk told Richie he wasn't the only one reliving the unpleasant bits of childhood right then—that Eddie disappeared when they crossed the threshold.

Eventually Richie posts up in the office while Eddie scavenges. It's the most Eddie of all the rooms and allows for easy, non-invasive snooping of the bookshelves, which are neat (not a big reader, his Eds) but full of the quasi-familiar things they've all unknowingly collected over the years. Like an incidental shrine, there's a few of Bill's books, some Steve Martin essays Richie _knows_ he'd never voluntarily read, _Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me_ on tape, and a tacky Florida snow globe hoarding dust on top.

Moving that last one disrupts a metric ton of dust, which is especially bizarre, and as Richie tries to measure how thick it is, his finger runs into something.

"Fuck, _that_ thing."

Richie tears his eyes away before he gets sucked in and sees Eddie in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, it's..." Eddie sighs, pulling open a drawer in the desk only to stare into it. "There's a reason I shoved it up there."

The objet d'monumental horror in question is Eddie's wedding photo, and he's right, it's... Well, it's a lot. Richie has to look at it briefly out of the corner of his eyes like an eclipse.

"Can I say you look miserable?" Richie tries. "Is that allowed?"

"Well it's true, so."

Eddie grabs a random folder and shuts the drawer—harder than he means to, judging by his owlish look—before taking the frame, not bothering to wipe off the glass. It's easier to look at Eddie looking at the photo, nose wrinkles out in full force, eyebrows knit together.

"I don't even remember taking this," Eddie says. "I think I was having a low grade panic attack the whole day."

"Oh." Richie wants to touch him but doesn't know how so he shoves his hands in his pockets. "That sucks, dude, sorry."

"Just. Ugh." Eddie blindly shoves the frame back into the dust and the Loser memorabilia in his bag before turning back. "When we get married it won't be like that."

The closest approximation of what happens in Richie's head then is between the zap of an electric fly swatter meeting a sizable foe and the fiss of hot metal hitting water.

"Uh—" Richie says to an empty room.

God, he always does this, the little gremlin: say some touching, romantic shit and then move on to something trivial while Richie's head spins like an abused goldfish. The other day he was running late (by Eddie standards) so Richie offered up his toast and Eddie kissed the top of Richie's head with a, "Thanks, sweetheart, love you," before sweeping out the door. It was ultimately fine because then Eddie missed his incredibly embarrassing reaction, but seriously, rude.

But he can't just drop this.

"Eddie?"

"Yeah?"

"You, uh..." Richie follows Eddie's blur down the hall, trying not to look like he's chasing him. Richie's pretty fluent in Eddie's body language (though he prefers reading it in braille) and there's a distinctly spooked feel to his back. "You think about us getting married?"

Around another corner: definitely trying to escape.

"Think about it, sure."

Richie catches up long enough to catch Eddie's blush, which is gratifying and beautiful. Eddie meets his eye and hurries out of the room again, but Richie gets stuck for a second on the novelty of just getting to watch and loses him again.

"Well yeah," Eddie continues. "I didn't think we'd talk about it the first fucking month we got together, but. Some day."

They land on opposite ends of the dining room, Richie in the doorway and Eddie über-casually fiddling with a random cabinet. There are more bunnies on the sideboard behind him that Richie glances at warily before saying, "I just... kinda thought you wouldn't want that."

"Why—?" Richie waves a hand at everything. "Okay fair. But I wasn't deeply unhappy because I was _married_ , I was deeply unhappy because I was gay and married to a _woman_. I haven't written off the whole institution."

"Oh," Richie says again, because, duh, but also the way Eddie looks at him then, all Bambi-esque eyes and tight jaw and eyebrows tipping up in the middle— All of it gets tentatively labelled _husband comma my_ in Richie's head and his brain short circuits.

Eddie's hands clench around the manila folder he's holding, the only sign of nervousness. "I mean." He pauses again, looking at Richie's blank face. "Duh."

The tense wire cranking itself around Richie's heart snaps and a laugh bursts out of him, heavy with relief. Eddie glares at the sound, but in that way that says he doesn't totally mean it.

"I mean, _obviously_." Eddie's impatience grows as Richie continues to giggle. "This isn't— We're forty, we live together, I love you like I've never loved anything before. It's not like we're just fucking around—"

"Oh, we're not fucking around?" It falls from his mouth, on complete reflex. "Well somebody should tell that to your dick because—"

"Shut _up_." Eddie gestures and the papers in his folder almost slip out. He sets the whole thing down definitively. "God, I love you, but seriously shut the fuck up and let me finish."

Richie does shut up, to be fair, but the grin on his face doesn't falter and Eddie flushes in that happyangry way as he starts gesticulating in earnest, vocal range expanding like he's acting for the back row of a college theater.

"Of course I want to marry you, moron, I mean— It's you. I could never just... _date_ you." Eddie's face, which had previously been kind of disbelieving and a little mean—sneering, but in a sweet way—then softens. "This was always gonna be, y'know. Forever."

The word drops a thick silence on them that blankets the room. Richie can feel his heartbeat in his wrists but everything he thinks to say is too lame for this sudden serious moment.

When it becomes apparent Richie isn't going to say anything, Eddie concludes with a hint of self-aware flippancy, "So yeah I wanna marry you. _Eventually_."

"So are you... proposing?" Richie swallows around nothing. "This isn't a proposal, is it?"

Eddie is very adept at rolling his eyes, and puts this skill to good use at present. "I'm still married, dumbass. No."

"Okay, then—"

"And when I propose to you, you'll know it, alright?"

"I. Okay."

"Good."

"Yeah."

Eddie nods. Richie nods. Then Richie crosses the room possibly faster than he would've thought humanly possible and gathers Eddie up in his arms: Eddie, who is already reaching back.

It's not quite a hug, or not just—embrace is probably the word. Richie's been told that he sometimes does this thing where he wraps himself around a person until his cheek is against the back of their head—once Eddie drunkenly described it as "like being the pile of treasure guarded by a blind, moronic dragon''. Eddie's no better, though: he's a squeezer. He wraps people up in his big strong arms and squeezes, the asshole. Honestly, he could probably lift Richie, at least for a second, which does things to Richie's squiggly mess of a limbic system, so he sticks a pin in that until Eddie's soon-to-be-ex-wife couldn't walk in at any moment.

To the air behind Eddie's head, Richie says, "So does this mean we're going steady? You gonna give me your pin, Eds? Your class ring? Do I get to wear your letterman's jacket?"

"There's a bunch of high school stuff in the attic, wanna look?" He volleys back. Eddie always did give as good as he got.

"Fuck, I forgot you actually had one!" Richie crows, pulling back to look at him. "Eddie Spaghetti, track star extraordinaire. Oh my god, I can't believe I fell in love with a jock."

"I can't believe I fell in love with a nerd," Eddie smirks back, "Mr. Runner-Up-Valedictorian."

"That's Mr. Salutatorian to you." He continues with an encouraging eye roll from Eddie, "I'll have you know I worked very hard to keep my GPA _just_ below Bradley fucking Donovan so I got the credit without having to do shit. Like academic edging."

"Ugh, don't use that word."

"You were the one who told me to do it!" Richie twists him back and forth with the words, "My sexy jock boyfriend."

"Not at the time! What, you think teenage Eddie knew what edging was?"

Richie squashes the corner of his mind that badly wants to continue that thread. "You said I couldn't be trusted to do a whole speech without saying something that would get me suspended at the last minute."

"And was I wrong?"

"Of course not, baby, when are you ever wrong?" Richie coos, as the sentence demands.

Eddie lets that one slide, maybe because of his good mood, maybe because it includes a generous stroke to his ego—though, it should be noted, Richie is eager to provide stroking of any kind whenever necessary—but Richie'll take it either way.

Accepting Richie's cheek kiss of gratitude, Eddie asks, "Anyway, my 'pin'? What is this, the fifties? Are we gonna split a fucking malted?"

"Well sure, Eds, I mean geez, you're a swell guy and all, but if we're gonna be going steady..." Eddie pushes him but, locked together, they just sway. "I will also accept the following: any kind of promise ring, a locket with your picture in it, a monogrammed handkerchief." After a beat he adds, "I know you definitely have that last one. Quit holding out on me."

Eddie rolls his eyes. "At least you didn't say matching tattoos."

"Gotta save _something_ for the wedding."

"There is no way—"

"Trinket shit," Richie steamrolls any objection. "Throw me a bone, babe—a lock of hair, if it's not too serial killer-y. Any token of your affection, dude. That's all I've ever wanted."

The last bit comes out more heartfelt than he meant,[5] but Eddie quickly does him one better.

"I have my wedding ring?"

It's a joke until it leaves his mouth, because then Richie is thinking about it, so Eddie is thinking about it, and then Eddie is fishing the ring out of his pocket, so Richie holds up his hand, and then Eddie works the ring onto his finger.

And then Richie is wearing a wedding ring.

Huh. He wiggles his fingers. Observations: basically feels how he thought a lump of metal on his finger would, although it's skinnier than he expected. It's pristine in a way that belies regular wear and warm from Eddie's pocket, where he'd stashed it after thinking better of chucking it in the river on the way over. It actually almost fits: although Eddie's hands are smaller, his fingers are thicker, and gravity settles the ring at the base of Richie's finger easily.

God, and there's easily a dozen jokes right there but he can't laugh because he keeps getting stuck trying to pin 'wedding ring' to the image of his own hand. His left hand. He didn't mean to pick that one.

Marriage is gonna ruin him.

"...Weird."

Eddie's voice is thin, stuck in the top of his throat. "Yeah, super weird."

It's kind of heavy, but in a good way.

"Okay, hang on—" Richie works the ring off and inexplicably feels smaller than he started, like part of him comes off with it. "Here."

Whatever it is dissipates when the ring is back in Eddie's hand, but Richie can't stop wondering. If he didn't know better, he'd say it was magic. But he helped defeat a space clown demon with the power of friendship, so he's just gonna think it until they're in bed with the lights off and it won't feel crazy to say out loud.

In the end, he doesn't have to wait even that long. All it takes is symbolically pouring a bottle of wine from his wedding Eddie found in the office closet down the sink and splitting something much nicer until Eddie brings it up, drunk and posted up on the couch together as the Lord intended.

"I don't know why you'd think I wouldn't wanna marry _you_." Eddie pokes Richie in the chest with his toes before adding in an obvious undertone, "Fucking... idiot."

He continues poking until Richie grabs his foot one-handed, the other holding his glass away from the couch lest it become collateral damage.

"How did we get back on this topic?"

Eddie hums, losing the plot a bit as he wiggles his toes in Richie's hand, then says, "I was never off it. Hey, do we still have those lentil turmeric crackers?"

Because Richie is a good boyfriend he fetches them. Because he's a selfish person he wedges his way between Eddie's back and the couch when he returns, gathering his warm armful of Eddie close as he grumbles about "crumbs everywhere" and shoves crackers in his mouth.

Once he's safely out of sight, chin on Eddie's head, Richie continues, "You were thinking about it all day?"

It's not that Richie doesn't believe him. He already knows they're it, forever, same as he knows Eddie's "Hey, stupid" and his "Hello, angel-light-of-my-life" mean the same thing. He's not _that_ insecure, he just... isn't used to hearing this stuff out loud yet.

"I've been thinking about it since I was seven and Bill said when you like someone more than a best friend that's love and you should marry them." Eddie crunches in time with the thump of Richie's heart. "I thought about other stuff in the meantime, duh, but, y'know. Over the years. Shit adds up."

Eddie taps his own head, then Richie's, though it's not his temple so much as his ear, endearingly uncoordinated. Richie's heart lingers in his throat as he detains Eddie's hand for a kiss.

"Plans?"

"Mm." Eddie pats his cheek and takes his hand back to continue eating. "Plans, thoughts, general..." He waves a single cracker around. "Imagery."

"Vibes," Richie nods—then, sensing a general intent to move, he pulls his head back so Eddie has room to look at him solemnly head-on.

"Richie? Baby? I love you? But sometimes you make _no_ sense."

He nods again, knocking their foreheads together on the follow through. "Cool."

"Cool," Eddie echoes. "Cuz I'm definitely gonna do it."

"Yeah?"

Eddie nods and turns around completely, cracker box falling onto Richie's leg. As his abnormally pointy elbows dig into Richie's thigh, Richie thinks, _I love you, I love you, there's no one else I'd want smearing cracker dust on my face, no one else I'd let get away with not telling me they wanted to marry me for thirty-three years, no one else I'd marry in the end_ , as loudly as he can at Eddie's subconscious or soul or whatever.

It probably works. Eddie's perceptive when he wants to be, and Richie believes in magic, so.

"Yeah," Eddie eventually clarifies. He leans in tenaciously and tenuously, steadied by Richie's own unsteady hands on his waist. "I'm gonna marry the shit out of you. I'll marry you better than anyone's married anyone else in the world. I'll be the best marrier ever."

"You know when you're drunk you start talking like me?"

"That is an awful thing to say to someone." Frowning, Eddie starts to clamber back out of Richie's lap but Richie holds him still, despite how nicely distracting the movement is. " _Mean_."

"No, please, Eddie my love, tell me more about what a good marrier you are."

Drunk Eddie's lack of filter extends to his facial expressions, which now slide through emotions including but not limited to: discomfort, pained fondness, guilt, and horniness. He lands on bashful resignation with a dash of determination, as befits any Eddie expression.

"I'm not a good marrier," he says plainly, resting his hands on Richie's neck. "I'm actually a really shitty one. I don't even remember my wedding, the whole thing is this big, panicky blur, and I sucked at being married, Rich, I really did."

"Doesn't mean you always will be," Richie mumbles, and Eddie nods, nods, nods.

"I know. I'm gonna be better this time. Way better. Because you make me better. Yeah okay, I—" He cuts off Richie's protest before it starts. " _I_ do it, but you make me want to be better, and you make it possible. When I'm with you it's like all these locked up parts of me open up. And I don't want to ever not see you every day again, that sucked, I missed you too much. So I'm gonna marry you."

Warmth sparks down Richie's back, but he's too drunk to repress the shitty feeling rising in his throat. He keeps his eyes on the smushed pillow he'd been lying on at the other end of the couch, tracing every crease until he can feel Eddie's stare grow concerned.

"What?"

Richie shrugs, but either it shows on his face or Eddie is a mindreader (equally possible at this point) because Eddie frowns and pokes his shoulder—nicely at first, then harder when he doesn't respond.

"It's dumb," he whines, "you're gonna think it's dumb."

"I think half of the shit you say is dumb. Doesn't mean I don't wanna hear it."

Okay, weirdly comforting; Richie takes a deep breath and blinks slowly, so his eyes are mostly closed and he doesn't have to make eye contact when he says, "I might not be."

There's a pause as Eddie rewinds the conversation. When he realizes what Richie is referring to he scoffs, and something must have gone wrong in Richie's wiring long, long ago because it just makes him feel safe.

"It's you," he says. "It's _us_ , dipshit. You think I'm gonna let us be anything other than the best at being married? No fucking way."

Eighty percent of the time they're together they cease to be functioning adults, but it makes sense. Whatever Eddie wants, Eddie gets, and whatever Eddie gets he sinks his teeth into so deep they come through the other side, especially if the alternative means losing or admitting he was wrong. That's the Eddie he loves, the Eddie he would and has risked his life for. If anyone could make being married to Richie easy through sheer force of will, it would be him.

Still... "I'm not really, like, _anyone's_ definition of husband material."

"You're mine." Eddie smooths his hand flatly over Richie's head. "You care for me. You make me laugh like nobody else, you cook me dinner, you always know when I actually can't do something and when I just need a push. You give me compliments and courage and—"

"Orgasms whenever you want."

Eddie grins. "Orgasms whenever I want. Honestly, that's it: I just wanna lock this down before other people figure out how hot you are and I have to vet another trophy husband."

Heart in his throat, Richie places his hand neatly on the back of Eddie's neck to pull him into a kiss that's sweet and firm and makes Richie feel like his head is full of bees. He feels both older and younger than he is, thrilled by the fact of kissing someone who loves him and yet easy and comfortable in a way that belies years of habit.

"If I'm crying it's from the idea of guaranteed sex forever," Richie says when they part. Technically no tears have been shed, but it's a near thing.

"Okay, you big baby."

Eddie kisses his cheek and presses it against his own before hooking his chin over Richie's shoulder. Decades of conditioning kick in and Richie swallows the urge to lean into it before he remembers he can.

"It's just _easy_ , Rich," he continues, scritching his nails through the back of Richie's hair in that way that always makes him feel like a kitten. "I'd say scary easy, but I'm not scared of anything anymore."

Richie, who remembers last week when Eddie was convinced there were rats in the wall but refused to look because the only thing worse than thinking it would be knowing it, nods. He's not wrong.

Eddie gives him one last, long look like he's seeing all those stupid wishes Richie's been harboring in the deepest part of his heart since he was a kid could, _would_ come true, before settling back, slouched to tuck his head under Richie's with his feet on the coffee table.

"It's sorta inevitable, y'know? Now that we're here, it's like..." He sighs against Richie's chest. "Sometimes I feel like it's already happened, I can picture it so fucking clearly."

Richie does know. It's been happening to him all day, little flickers: the feeling of cool metal and Eddie's careful hands, his own mouth moving indecipherably, Eddie with those eyes and his pursued "I'm not laughing, no, really, I'm just disappointed" mouth, two pieces of hair falling loose on his forehead. He wants it all so badly. He'd marry Eddie right now if he could, profess in front of God and all His Losers that this is it, the rest of his forevers; that there's no one else who will get his dog-tired toothpaste kisses, no one else he'd rather watch ships go down with. He wouldn't even try to make a joke.

But he knows the present is more complicated, so he winds his arms around Eddie and buries his face in Eddie's hair. He smells like dandruff shampoo and his fancyboy cologne, a combination that should be repulsive but is just so _Eddie_ that it only makes Richie want to swallow him whole.

Instead he props his chin up on Eddie's head and drawls, "Well that's real sweet of ya, darling, though I hate to think what the missus would say."

Eddie snorts and smacks Richie's chest lightly with the back of his hand, curling further in on himself.

"I just wonder if there ain't something we could do," Richie continues, contorting the vowels almost beyond recognition as he slides from Southern Belle to Antebellum Lawyer. "Slip her a bit of the ol' inheritance powder..."

"Stop." Eddie laughs, sitting up to look Richie in the eye as he says, "That's awful, shut the fuck up."

"So murder's off the table then?" Richie asks as himself. Eddie's laugh—his real one, full and nerdy—is the greatest reward Richie's ever found, so he's already content.

Eddie lies back down, not dignifying it with an answer. Silence settles over them like fresh sheets thrown over a bed, but something is percolating in Richie's head, about prophecy and precognition and other big, metaphysical words he'd swear he's heard Mike use.

"Hey Eds?"

Eddie hums, definitely not stealthily eating another cracker; there's nothing stealthy about it.

"Do you believe in magic?"

His head bops to some unheard rhythm as he chews. Once he swallows, he says, "S'a good song. I don't remember the next line though."

Richie blinks and the cosmic whatever disperses. "What?"

"The—" Eddie sings the titular line of the Lovin' Spoonful song and hums the next, which Richie dimly recognizes. "That one."

"Grandma music." Eddie's elbow pushes into his stomach. Possibly an accident, as he then stretches to grab at the wine on the coffee table, but Richie still says a token, "Ow."

"Shh, concentrating."

"I meant for real though," he continues once Eddie's restocked.

Eddie takes a drink and holds the bottle out. "Do I think magic's real for real?"

"Yeah."

"Kinda hard not to, with the clown and all." Eddie shrugs the shoulder not leaning into Richie. "I guess... I dunno if it's magic or God or karma or what, but I think we're all pretty lucky."

"And maybe a little psychic?"

"Perceptive," Eddie suggests with a hint of spooky wisdom that conjures late nights in Bill's basement watching terrible horror movies with the lights off to make the fake blood pop. Knowing Eddie—which he does, so well—it's probably even on purpose, which makes Richie feel like his heart's about to burst.

In the same voice but more, Richie adds, "Sensitive," with a finger wiggle that makes Eddie snort, so double check.

He takes the bottle, definitely not thinking about the "indirect kiss" of it all. Except Eddie's occupied with his covert snacking, so Richie takes a second to indulge his perpetual inner dweeb and grin into the side of Eddie's head.

After just long enough that Richie's half lost in the wobbly labyrinth of his inebriation, Eddie mumbles, "I don't care."

"About...?"

Eddie takes back the bottle with another gentle elbowing and puts it away. "If we get married."

"Uh, you sure? You sounded pretty invested. I recall an impassioned speech?"

It says a lot about Richie's emotional development that he's able to bypass concern and jump straight into jokes. Honestly, Eddie should appreciate it as a sign of maturity.

He doesn't, knocking their heads together instead, but then he smooths his thumb over the skull ridge behind Richie's ear so it evens out. "I meant I'm good either way. Having you at all is already the best thing to happen to me." He turns Richie to face him and concludes with a jocular little head wiggle, "You make me very happy."

Eddie leans back, tugging Richie with him as he blinks.

"Well geez, Eds," he says, aiming for ironic self-effacement and getting stranded in tenderness on his way, "that's all I ever wanted."

"I know that."

Body thrumming with contentment, Eddie rests his cheek on Richie's head. Richie can't see it but he knows Eddie is smiling the way you know where you are in dark, familiar rooms, the way Eddie knows where he is anywhere at any time.

"You can. If you want," he says into Eddie's collarbone. It's as close as he can get to the words right now.

"Kay." Eddie pushes his face into Richie's hair. "Gonna marry the shit out of you."

"Sure thing, honeybunches of oats."

"Mm... Can I tell you a secret?"

Richie traces up the outer seam of Eddie's jeans one last time before clasping his hands around Eddie's middle. "Yeah."

"I actually really like the nicknames," Eddie stage whispers.

"I knew that."

"Yeah."

"Pretending you don't is part of the fun, though."

Eddie jostles him excitedly. " _Exactly_." He settles back over Richie and squeezes him once. "You get it."

Then he's humming, throat buzzing against Richie's ear. It's never quite in tune, and disjointed like he can't remember the order of the pieces, and Richie would happily stay hunched over here until he died.

"Wassat?"

"Mm. 'Butchie's Tune.' Now _that's_ a song."

Eddie starts singing under his breath a jauntily sad tune that Richie doesn't recognize. He loses the thread at some point and muddles through incomprehensibly, but Richie doesn't care; it only matters that it's Eddie singing it to him, close and unselfconscious, gently squeezing Richie's hands around his waist.

Richie falls asleep to dream of a long leafy highway and a weight on his finger: a ring he somehow knows as well as the hand he is holding. He doesn't question it—dream logic, sure, but the real stuff too, twisted together too tightly to ever split again.

* * *

5 To be fair, he's only been entertaining fantasies of marrying the guy since his best approximation of a wedding would have an audience full of stuffed animals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> richie: is this a proposal?  
> eddie: no  
> me, eating a sandwich, already typing proposal in the tags: ...........mm?
> 
> this fic accidentally became about richie (and the rest of the losers, but him being the pertinent one here) maybe being psychic. it comes up more in the stan lives fic I'm writing that takes place in this same loosely connected verse but I wasn't expecting it to here, it just sort of... happened.
> 
> speaking of accidents, if you somehow get what the end is an homage to congrats, hats off to you


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> richie gets bullied with affection: the musical
> 
> no content warnings but just a reminder to turn off work skin on mobile and on on desktop. you guys know the drill, but the beginning note only shows on the first chap so c'est la vie

**III.** August

_Cause I love the way you call me baby  
And you take me the way I am_

Ingrid Michaelson, "The Way I Am"  
  
---  
  
Richie has always kind of hated being a morning person, but now he thinks maybe it's all been for this. Now mornings mean getting to watch Eddie wake up, a long and arduous process. It's a grumpy miracle; Eddie is very much not a morning person, despite the fact that he wakes up early every day without fail, no matter whether he needs to or not. He's a masochist but Richie loves it, getting to cuddle him awake and coax him into morning sex, getting to make Eddie toast and watch him eat it without fully opening his eyes.

Even when he has his own shit to do and just bumps into Eddie around the house it's nice—to individually exist in each other's space. After burying his face in Eddie's pillow for a bit, he'll stumble upon Eddie in the kitchen, already dressed for work or his run or (rarely) in pajamas still, hair loose, eating yogurt or something, all striped with morning sunlight like a fucking poem. And then he'll smile at Richie, both too comfortable to speak, and buff a kiss across Richie's cheek on his way out the door, making Richie feel like a TV housewife in a way that kinda rocks.

Today it's orange juice, and he has a carton in one hand and a glass in the other when Richie shows up to do his daily adoration. It's technically his second adoration of the day after Eddie stopped while getting dressed and yanked Richie flat on the bed from his slouch against the headboard, but absence makes the heart grow fonder and Richie took the second shower.

He even got dressed—mostly because Eddie is also in a great mood, and whenever Richie does something responsible-like that increases.[6] His shirt is kind of wrinkly, but it's always like that, and he even cleaned his glasses (on said shirt, but still). He tried.

It must work (maybe more than Richie intended) because when Eddie notices his entrance, his look of surprise has a hint of approval that makes Richie's heart hurry a couple beats on principle, not yet knowing what it's for.

"Oh."

"Oh what?"

"You look..." Eddie's head tilts contemplatively. "Handsome."

He turns back to the fridge as soon as he says it, thankfully missing the whole face journey Richie goes on.

"Oh," he echoes dumbly. "Uh. Really?"

"Yeah." Eddie is sipping his juice as he re-emerges, enviably nonchalant and put together in a way that makes Richie feel even more like a melting B-movie wax monster. "You wouldn't think 'Dapper Dan button down with more wrinkles than a grandpa's ass' and 'punny tourist trap shirt' would go together, but somehow you make it work."

This, though also nice, doesn't answer Richie's question. "You think I'm handsome."

Eddie rolls his eyes, downing the rest of his juice and rinsing the glass as he says, "Alright, now you're fishing."

"No, I mean— Seriously?"

Eddie turns his giant _wait, have you_ actually _lost your mind this time?_ eyes on Richie for the first time in the entire conversation. Blink. Blink.

"...Seriously?"

Richie waves his arms to say something, anything. "Seriously!"

"Wh— Of course I'm serious! How much sex do we have to have for you to realize I think you're hot?"

Richie's mouth clunks open and shut uselessly like an elevator door with something stuck in it. "Hot isn't the same as handsome! Those are two different concepts! You can be ugly and also hot, that's a thing, uglyhot—"

"You're not _ugly_ , Richie, what the fuck?"

"Well—!" _Ehhh..._ "Okay, but, like, average, you know? 'Handsome' is like... Ben is handsome. _Mike_ is handsome. You're handsome! It's a word for, for romantic leads and young senators, not middle-aged, borderline-alcoholic comedians."

Eddie snorts unwittingly. "Young senators?"

"Yeah like, JFK, you, James Marsden." Eddie's brow crinkles in the way that means he wants to quibble and yes, even that proves Richie's point. "No one's picking this at the Prince Charming casting call, dude."

Eddie, not knowing where to begin (odds are either "dude" or the choice of James Marsden), holds his hand up across his forehead. Richie, inexplicably, loves when he does this, even though a solid fifty percent of the time it's exasperation aimed at Richie himself. It reminds him of the summer Eddie's standard fanny pack/calculator watch/cargo shorts look was augmented by this insane bingo grandma visor that eventually ended up in the river (not that Eddie seemed saddened by the loss). The image of his pink face shielded by pink light imposed on that of adult Eddie in his neat little suit and tie, crisp shirt with tiny polka dots, shiny shoes, is fantastically fitting.

Also, it's kinda cute in general—but that's Eddie for ya.

"Okay, what is it you think makes people handsome that you don't have?" Eddie eventually asks, adding under his breath to himself, "I can't believe I'm doing this."

"I don't know, like— Bones?"

"What?"

"Like. Structure? Of bones."

" _You_ have bones."

"No I mean." Richie waves at his general face area. " _Good_ bones."

" _You_ have good bones." Before Richie can interrupt again, Eddie continues, "You have a great jawline, your— You've got, like, planes and angles and shit, so. Next."

Richie wracks his overheating brain for anything other than _Eddie, Eddie handsome, Eddie me handsome?_ and various combinations of those three words.

"I don't know, uh, eyes?"

"Are you just listing body parts?"

Richie, who was definitely doing that: "No."

Despite this poor performance, Eddie steps forward and nabs Richie's glasses. Richie stands still and tries not to blink as Eddie examines him; his heart always lurches when he realizes Eddie is close enough to see clearly even without his glasses (which has gotta be pretty close, he's blind as shit) but it's quiet right now under Eddie's inspection. Best behavior.

"Check."

Eddie absentmindedly rubs at the red mark on the side of his nose as he leans back, right to the blurry edge of Richie's vision. When Richie realizes that he feels _two_ hands on his face, he looks up to see his glasses on Eddie's head and every synapse in his brain goes off like skittering ground fireworks. Even though they're still most definitely Richie Glasses and don't suit him, they look weirdly right—like they maybe fit Eddie _because_ they're Richie's.

"What, no monologue, no similes about bodies of water?"

"Nope." He slides them back on for Richie, fixing the little flippy bits over his ears that get squashed in the process. "If you can't see that by now there's no hope for you."

"Well, seeing isn't exactly my strong suit." Richie wiggles his eyebrows up and down until his glasses slip down his nose, but Eddie pushes them back up for him again with only a brief look.

"What else?" He doesn't even give Richie time to respond, not that he was going to, knowing better than to stand in the way of an Eddie Rant. "The hair I'll give you. It's nice to touch, and the little grey you've got makes even you look distinguished, but the whole thing is too close to 'midseason hockey player' to really count. You dress like colorblind Oscar the Grouch fucking _Hangover_ 'ed himself through a thrift store, but it makes sense for you, and when you actually try to look put together it's honestly so much better by comparison that it's almost twice as good. You're tall and your voice can get really deep, both easy wins, but when you talk seriously about something you care about there's this confidence and _something_ that, yeah, is sexy because I already think you're sexy, but objectively too."

Eddie takes a deep breath like he wasn't expecting to get this far uninterrupted. Unfortunately for his lungs, Richie is enraptured, and maybe not all there mentally speaking, so he keeps going at a more sedate (though no less earnest) pace.

"Plus your shoulders are broad when you bother to stand up straight and let's just say there's a reason I don't mind you giving me beard burn all the time." Eddie reaches up to brush his thumbs across said stubbled planes and angles and shit and is only a little teasing when he says, "So yes, Richie, you are very handsome."

His neat little head tilt is the last straw, the scissor snip on the last thread of Richie's sanity. Not like it wasn't already there: no, been there, done that, got the commemorative dedication plaque. _This heart was brought to you by the generous donations of the Edward F. Kaspbrak foundation._

Anyway, Eddie is watching him, smiling sweetly, which is cute, and all self-satisfied, which is incredibly hot. Richie would tease him about never being hotter than when he's lying to Richie's face except he can't focus on much of anything right now with his spine trying to liquidate its way out of his body. He shivers, but nothing more articulate.

Regardless, Eddie leans back to hit him with a very skeptical eyebrow. " _Wow_ , really?"

"Shut up," Richie says around a weak laugh, eyes squeezed shut to escape said eyebrow.

"I wish you'd mentioned this earlier," Eddie is saying, close and amused in a way that makes Richie cover his face with his hands for good measure, "I would've been way less nervous about phone sex if I knew all it took was fucking sweet nothings and affection."

When Richie peeks, Eddie is looking at him exactly how his voice sounded (unimpressed and unbearably fond) and Richie finds it hard to tear his eyes from Eddie on a good day but it's nigh impossible right now because—

See, this is what he was trying to say. Eddie is _handsome_ —he has those big, warm eyes and soft hair and dimples that could give you vertigo (one of which is deeper than the other, he's checked). This is Eddie, who owns ties and wears cologne, whose stubble never makes him look like he overslept his twenties like _some_ people, who has those thighs that feel so strong under his fancy suit pants, pulled taut when he's perched on Richie's lap. Sometimes he'll smirk or half smile fondly at some fuckup of Richie's and his eyes fucking _twinkle_ , it's unbearable, Richie's under constant attack in his own home.

"That's not what this is," he tries, but he doesn't buy it either—especially not when Eddie sweetly nuzzles his nose and his eyes cross and widen at the exact same time.

"Mhm. Hey Richie?"

Richie's voice tilts up warily. "Yeah?"

"Sweetheart?"

"Oh no. No no no no."

Richie tries desperately to wriggle away before he starts giggling hysterically or something even more embarrassing. The look on Eddie's face and the way he drapes his arms around Richie's neck clearly telegraph the grossly lovey voice that's going to come out of his mouth, which is bad enough, and Richie doesn't plan on staying around long enough to actually hear it with his human ears.

"Aw, honey." More wriggling. "Baby, of course you're handsome." Eddie lands a kiss mostly on his cheek, despite, again, the continued wriggling and laughing and mostly-faux gagging. "Idiot man of my dreams. My beautiful lover."

" _Ew_."

Eddie, catching Richie's wrist, gets dragged along and calls out in an impressive impression, "Come here, loverboy."

"Oh my _god_." It's simultaneously absolutely mortifying and deeply endearing, and Richie's having a hard time keeping the two emotional realms distinct when he's busy containing the Elephant's Foot of love bubbling inside him. "Don't bring your Swayze crush into this! There's never been a more unrealistic expectation and you know that!"

Richie frees himself as Eddie starts cackling, and the sound of his favorite sound is almost to distract him from running away to lie awkwardly across the sofa to hide his face in the nearest pillow and start squealing like his crush just talked to him in homeroom (he knows the feeling; Eddie talked to him all the time but it never got old, obviously).

"Yeah, how's it feel being on the other side for once?"

Almost.

But so be it! If the price he must pay for love (embodied now by Eddie flopping on top of him) is total embarrassment, he will. Richie doesn't care that Eddie definitely sends a photo of Richie's blurry happy face to the Losers chat (he feels the buzz in his pocket) once he lands. He knows now—or at least is learning—it's not embarrassing to be happy.[7] He keeps telling himself that as his brain churns out pink noise and Eddie burrows closer to kiss the back of his neck.

Now fully draped over Richie's back, Eddie's head hangs over his shoulder, only a warm slice of air between their cheeks. He would know that face by touch alone—by not even touch but the mere implication of it, in the imagined shift of air molecules. He can feel the topography of Eddie's face in that gap: there is his cheekbone, his scar, the little spot always above his jaw that Eddie's self-conscious about but Richie still can't stop staring at because he loves it because it's Eddie and only Eddie.

Eddie sighs in a long, settling way, body pushing down into and up from Richie's under him. If Richie weren't so boneless with contentment right now he'd say something about weighted blankets having nothing on this; as is he lays there, face smushed into the weave of the couch, letting Eddie breathe on him lovingly.

They lie there for a moment until Eddie sighs again in a preparatory way before saying into the space between them and the couch, "Well _I_ like looking at you." His hands worm their way under and around his middle, hugging him close. "My dumb sasquatch motherfucker."

"See, that one I believe," Richie mumbles.

Eddie presses in closer, cheek to cheek, and the pressure makes them pudgy like when they were kids.

"Dumb, handsome sasquatch motherfucker," he amends.

Richie blows raspberries into the couch.

"Dumb, handsome, sexy sasquatch motherfucker."

Richie twists to blow more raspberries into Eddie's cheek. He gets an elbow to the ribs and a knee to the thigh in response as Eddie climbs off him, but he's still stifling laughter with that adoring twinkle when Richie turns back, so what does it matter?

"Hey." Eddie shoves Richie's legs off the sofa so he can sit right next to him and shoves at his side. "C'mere."

Richie turns over haphazardly, flopping his legs over Eddie's lap, and is immediately distracted by how Eddie's hair is flat from resting against Richie. Maybe if he doesn't say anything Eddie will leave for work like that and see his reflection in the rear view mirror and think of Richie while he fixes it. That would be nice.

"I'm here."

A tug on his elbow. "Here- _er_."

Rising like a vampire from his coffin, Richie sits up and tucks his legs under himself. The arm that Eddie had across the back of the couch falls to rub a comforting thumb across Richie's shoulder. When his own hand falls to Eddie's thigh, inches from where his knees are also pressed, Eddie's eyes slip briefly shut. He looks so comfortable like this, head tipped lazily against his own arm, smiling at Richie like he's something that makes being quiet like this easy.

"You know I love you," Eddie says.

"Yeah," Richie says, admittedly lightly embarrassed. "Yeah, I do."

"And I'm..." Without breaking eye contact, he takes a deep breath. "Attracted to you."

Richie smirks. "Miracle of miracles."

"Shut up." Eddie bonks their foreheads together, which Richie weathers admirably. "I love you. And I know you know that. But sometimes I think you don't believe it." He pauses for Richie to correct him, which he obviously doesn't. "And I... I want you to be able to believe it."

Beverly's voice echoes dark and wet between them. It happens like this, sometimes, where the weight of everything they've been through and everything they've done will drop into an ordinary moment like a rock in still water.

Honest to god, Richie forgets about the sewers sometimes. It's not anything like the clown amnesia, it just... slips his mind. These people are just so ingrained in his life now that it's no longer his first thought. She's Beverly, who emails him listicles about himself being embarrassing in public, before she's Beverly, his childhood friend who he fought an ancient alien with twice; across from him on the sofa is Eddie, the man he loves who steals his toothpaste and changes the wifi password whenever Richie forgets to do the dishes, before he's Eddie, the boy who's broken arm he tried to fix once in terror.

Other times, though, that weird other feeling surfaces from somewhere deep, deeper than any of them could contain. Something intuitive and casually magnetic and _other_. When it comes to the forefront like this the world gets heavy, like he can feel the weight of unsaid words between them suddenly crystal clear.

Richie grimaces, raising an eyebrow to say, _I'm not the one in this relationship who can believe something so hard it becomes true._

 _I don't think that's true._ Eddie tilts his head thoughtfully. _I think you can do it._

Richie half-smiles. _You believe I can?_

 _Yeah_. Eddie squeezes his shoulder. _I believe in you._

"Okay." He leans to tap his cheek against Eddie's hand in one of those little weird gestures that Eddie seems to love more than any other. "Love you."

Now that the spooky moment has passed, the self-conscious itch sets in and Richie defaults, like always, to jokes. He sticks his glasses on Eddie's face, smiling when Eddie immediately goes cross-eyed with dismay and doesn't say anything about oils and bacteria and shit.

"You know, you'd be sexy with glasses too," he says as Eddie tries futilely to adjust them into something less gruesome. "Hot nerd chic. Like a startup CEO who has to learn to love in a Hallmark movie."

"Hm, y'know, I used to think your glasses were hot? But now that I know what they actually do? I don't think I'll ever be able to think about anything but the migraine these are giving me." Eddie blinks his already enormous eyes dramatically. "Fuck, dude, I feel like a goldfish on LSD."

Richie cannot comprehend how no one ever believes him when he says Eddie is the funniest person he's ever met. It's like he realized he didn't have asthma and decided Richie would have to pick up the slack, shit, seriously, he can't breathe.

"Please, Eds, you gotta stop being funnier than me," he pleads between wheezes. "If word gets out I'm not even funnier than my own boyfriend, I'll be out of a job and then we'll both be fucked."

While Richie continues to lose his shit, Eddie pushes Richie's glasses onto the top of his own head and then pats Richie's cheek, smiling the entire time. "Aw, poor baby. You know I make more money than you anyway."

It's pretty easy to get the giggles under control when Eddie is looking at him like that. He's aware that he's preening, but it feels justified when Eddie's gaze is wandering all over his face like every inch of it is fascinating. Richie trusts Eddie more than anyone he knows, no matter what crazy, impulsive, factually wrong things he does.

Eddie takes off the glasses and Richie ducks his head, letting Eddie slide them up and onto his head, pushing back his hair. His fingertips linger across Richie's face before resting on his shoulder as Eddie kisses him calmly, slow and lingering. A couple of Richie's fingers sneak under the placket of Eddie's shirt, his thumb on one of those little buttons, not holding him in place, just... holding him.

"Okay." Eddie's hand slides across Richie's cheek as he pulls back. "I gotta go. I gotta. Work."

Richie fixes his glasses in preparation. "Right."

"Right." Eddie kisses him again, this time over his eyebrow, and tugs lightly on the hair that's fallen back over Richie's forehead. "Seeya, Lucy."

One more peck and Eddie goes back to the kitchen, leaving Richie to flop back down again. Hidden by the back of the couch, he lets himself silently but visually freak out. After two seconds of this, he adds, "Seeya, Ricky."

The sound of water fills the room. Richie realizes belatedly that it's from Eddie rinsing out his juice glass from a lifetime ago. If he'd known what was going to happen when he walked in, he would've grabbed a glass himself; he's kinda dizzy, and though it's almost certainly from the complete disturbance of his sense of self and not low blood sugar, it couldn't hurt.

When the water stops, Eddie says, "You know, I still think it's weird that I get the one that sounds sort of like your name."

"Yeah well I think it's weird that the only nickname you have no issues with is the one completely unrelated to _your_ name," Richie says, smiling dopily at the ceiling and giddy in his invisibility, "but here we are."

"I contain multitudes, bitch."

He can practically hear Eddie sticking his nose in the air and has to laugh. "Boy, don't I know it."

The blank ceiling he'd been talking to is suddenly filled with Eddie's face and before Richie can blink Eddie is on him. He has to lean his entire upper body over the back of the couch, propped up one hand on the seat next to Richie's head, to reach Richie's mouth, but he goes for it with a gusto that belies these acrobatics.

Of course, Richie kisses back. He can't not, it's a reflex, and this morning has already been such an onslaught of emotion and latent horniness he's on the verge of overloading even before Eddie tugs on his bottom lip. He's a little in his head about it still, but no amount of lingering bashfulness can distract him when Richie can feel Eddie's tie brushing his stomach. He's only human.

"Man, you just keep coming back for more, huh," he pants when they separate, defaulting to jokes while he tries to get the head spinning under control. "Can't keep your hands off the ol' trashbod."

"Yeah," Eddie says, his voice low and dead serious. "Pretty much."

He retreats in a weirdly jerky way that makes Richie think he must have been up on his toes, though his brain is too blasted apart to say so. While one hand smooths his tie back into place, still holding his keys, the other drags across Richie's chest as he goes, leaving in its wake a fizziness like Pop Rocks in a can of Coke. Richie leans up into the touch even as he shivers away, latched onto his other wrist as he watches Eddie's eyes darken.

"That's why I can't work from home," Eddie continues. He presses more firmly and thoughtfully watches his own hand drag wrinkles through Richie's shirt. "I'd never get anything done."

"Ha," Richie says with an embarrassing breathiness. "Okay. Probably a good thing then."

Eddie rubs over Richie's chest one more time before tweaking his nipple. Richie yelps, Eddie cackles, Richie shoves at his face, Eddie stands up out of his reach.

"Fucker! Get the—!" Richie tosses a throw pillow up at him which misses spectacularly as Eddie takes a single step to the right, keys jangling. "Go! You can't outfunny me out of my job just to lose yours too. Someone has to pay for all your fucking dry cleaning."

"It's not my fault I respect my belongings. Pick up your shit, you animal." Eddie whips the pillow at Richie's chest and disappears again, clinking and rustling his way around the apartment. Richie can match each sound to the steps of his routine: here is Eddie picking up his bag in the kitchen, shrugging on his jacket, pulling on his shoes at the door.

Richie hugs the pillow to his chest and calls out, "You love me!"

"You better believe it!" The front door lock clunks, but the following footsteps head the wrong direction and Eddie's head pops up one more time, his smile now sweet, ridiculous dimples out in full force. "Bye, Richie."

Richie sits up and kisses him again. It's uncomplicated and brief, but his stomach swoops nonetheless. "Bye, Eds."

After brushing their noses together, Eddie finally heads for the door. Richie watches him go, chin on his arms folded over the couch, looking like the lovestruck fool they both know he is. He feels slightly embarrassed still, but it's fading fast when Eddie looks just as foolishly in love, walking backwards into things so he can keep looking at Richie. Richie doesn't want to look away either. So he doesn't.

* * *

6 Also when he does something irresponsible but fun/nice/thoughtful/sweet/mean-but-to-people-who-deserve-it; it turns out, Eddie isn't super picky when it comes to finding Richie charming. Fucking score.

7 Ugh. Gag. No, that's way more embarrassing than _Dirty Dancing_. Go back to teasing Eddie: imagine if he had hair like Baby, how dumb would that be? Or would it actually be adorable... Okay, back to the drawing board.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> meant to update a couple days ago to keep with my loose schedule (every other day) but my summer course started and I had a brainwave idea for the creative final project I had to jot down real quick. it might end up being a short story thats secretly an au with these two, so if you see a really weird scifi short about an interstellar switchboard operator on here in august, know that's what I've been doing lol
> 
> ik I've said before that this fic is only so long & so badly paced bc I COULD NOT drag them apart, but this is truly one of the worst offenders. can you feel how much I was trying to just push eddie out the door? the bitch would not leave! it got to the point where I had to call it out in-text bc I truly couldn't stop it
> 
> notes:  
> -the bit eddie does is from "love is strange" by mickey & sylvia, as seen in _dirty dancing_. I've never seen more than the ten minutes of it but I fully believe little eddie kaspbrak was obsessed with it  
> -lucy and ricky from _i love lucy_ , natch  
> \- there's a line that I didn't realize until way too late was cribbed from the social network & if you find it do NOT @ me (do @ me tho)  
> -there's also a reference to the urban legend about the mikey kid from the life cereal commercials, to balance out the obvious 80s reference with something more obscure
> 
> !!!! OH ALSO someone asked if they could do art of a scene in this but deleted the comment before I could say YES!!!! anything else like podfic or remixing or anything inspired by I ask you float it by me first but YES ART PLEASE OMG, I'd love to see what you guys imagine !!!!


	4. Chapter 4

**IV.** October

_Time makes you bolder, even children get older_ _  
__And I'm getting older too_

Fleetwood Mac, "Landslide"  
  
---  
  
Occasionally in his life, Richie has entertained the idea that, in an universe where he grew up on the opposite side of the border, everything is okay.

It started when he was a kid. Canadian Richie was like the ultimate, coolest Richie, like his good twin: he wasn't popular because only assholes were popular, but he knew sick skateboard tricks and his mom never brushed his hair and he had a treehouse with a root beer fountain and shit like that. At first he picked Canada because it was just different enough; eventually, it soothed the feral something inside him to have that excuse when dreaming about running away to Canada for a better life started to have a particular association. No, Canadian Richie was Canadian because it was close, because his grandparents were, and not because he was gay.[8]

And yet here he is now, gay Canadian Richie. Not Canadian, y'know, but in Canada (specifically, the driveway of the house outside Toronto his parents bought after Derry) and definitely gay. Super gay. Like, holding the hand of the husband he just married in Niagara Falls where the mist means there's rainbows all the time gay. Having a minor panic attack, but also gay.

"Only people we don't know come to the front door," Richie quotes wisely as he tugs Eddie up the driveway. "And believe me, I can't wait to get to make a bunch of backdoor jokes about that now. Gotta keep the black sheep title somehow, now that I don't have the terminally single thing to fall back on."

Eddie, kindly, does not mention the deathgrip Richie has on his elbow, one which no amount of ice would excuse the nervous strength of. "You're nowhere near cool or deadbeat enough to be a black sheep. Have you ever been banned from a family gathering? Even I have."

Ah yes, the Great Shrimp Debacle of 1993. What Richie would've given to see that particular Eddie freak out.

"Okay, fine!" He throws up his free hand, slipping a little in his indignation. "I give up. I will never be the coolest Tozier."

"But we knew that," Eddie finishes for him, and he flashes a smile Richie's way that feels like a warm bath. "I've never been happier to be an only child. I'm okay with being both the coolest and lamest Kaspbrak."

"Not anymore." Eddie elbows him back with his mischief face. "But yeah, what the fuck is up with that? How did I end up with so many only child friends? Literally everyone else I know has siblings—do you think It fucked with everyone's reproductive systems? Seems counterintuitive for a kid-eating machine."

They've reached the door but Richie still doesn't knock. He can't. It's like he has vertigo, two feet between the wooden surface and his hand in his pocket suddenly wider than the Grand Canyon, than the fucking Atlantic, and he's going to topple in.

It's not a big deal. It's kind of a big deal. It's not like—

"Like, okay, none of us had kids. Makes sense if It wanted us to have nothing stopping us from coming back."

He's told them, right? They know: that he's gay, that he's with Eddie, even that they're married—Richie didn't have this panic attack that morning when he texted his dad, _hey, in o canada to get married this wknd, wanna hang?_ that morning or even on the call (forty minutes later after shower sex with his shiny new husband when Richie finally remembered to check) where both his parents shouted directions at him with excited outrage.

"But you'd think if It could fuck with people like that then the people _in_ Derry would have a bunch of kids so It could chow down on a good forty of them and still have enough for a next generation, like hunter-gatherer bullshit."

They've even Skyped—only anxiety-inducing because Richie hates hearing his own voice—so it's not like they haven't... whatever, _seen_ him be gay. Seen him and known that he's gay. Seen him with his boyfriend, figured out oh yeah, that's why little Richie was so fucking obsessed with that kid, why he's always alone at the holidays, why he's always alone, fuck, and then just moved on to the usual family updates and remarks about how he needs a haircut.

"Which is fucked up either way, yeah, but would a little consistency kill It? Pick a lane, dude, kids or no kids."

This isn't the big revelation, is what he's saying. There's no suspense. There should be nothing to worry about. He tries telling that to the shaking hand shoved deep in his pocket, to no avail.

"And don't even get me started on the whole radio quiet zone thing—seriously, how is there not already a true crime podcast about Derry? It's the digital age, dude, what, did It control fucking Twitter?"

In his cold haze of rambly panic, Richie doesn't notice his hand being unlatched from Eddie's forearm or Eddie moving into his line of unfocused sight. He does, however, notice when everything goes dark.

"Wha—" Richie splutters yarn fuzz from his mouth, pulling the hat (which Eddie insisted he wear!) back off his head, glasses attached. "Seriously?"

Eddie grabs his glasses before they fall and points pointedly with his free hand. "Get it together, man."

"I can take care of myself," he says as Eddie cleans his glasses for him. He tips his head to let Eddie put him back together. "I'm an adult."

"I know."

"I have a career."

"Debatable."

"I'm married."

A tiny smirk. "You sure are."

Richie says to the slushy sidewalk beneath their feet, quickly and quietly like no one'll hear, "But what if my mommy's disappointed in me."

The hands messing with his hair stop. _Ah, fucked it up, Richard, try again next time_ , a bored voice in the back of his mind says.

"Richie..."

"I know, I know, of all the things—"

When Eddie nudges at his chin, Richie looks up, whatever unfunny joke he had lined up ( _man walks into a bar after killing an ancient space demon, saving generations to come from endless eldritch terror and himself from a life of unhappiness and repressed dishonesty, and says to the bartender, "I'm afraid that I disappointed my parents by getting married," and the bartender says..._ ) dying on his lips. There is no pity in his eyes, no judgment or laughter. All that waits there for him is understanding, as concrete as the hand now on his cheek.

Eddie raises his eyebrows a little. "You think I'm not nervous?"

"You don't _look_ nervous." Richie fidgets. "Which is saying something."

Eddie doesn't bother with the dig. "I haven't seen your parents since I was the kid you had to drive everywhere in high school because his mother wouldn't let him learn how to drive—"

"Oh shit, _yeah_ —"

"—a fact none of us remembered until five months ago thanks to some fucked up alien amnesia, so now I'm showing up twenty years later as the guy you re-met _five months ago_ and just _eloped_ with to get _gay_ _married_ to in _Niagara Falls_."

Richie's hands land on Eddie's heaving chest. If he tries really hard (and he does) he imagines he can feel Eddie's lungs stretching open wider and wider, working exactly the way they always have, exactly the way they should, and Richie's so _proud_ of Eddie. He thinks that as loudly as he can and rubs Eddie's shoulders.

When Eddie has his breath again, he adds unnecessarily, "I'm _very_ nervous. But it'll be fine."

They kiss briefly, a firm, grounding press of lips, and as they pull apart Eddie presses an extra one to Richie's ring, which whites out 90% of his thoughts.

"Okay."

"Okay," Richie repeats dumbly. 

"Right?"

"Right."

Richie tries to rein it in, folding his arms around Eddie's waist and listening to the birds singing down the block, but judging by Eddie's face it doesn't work and he tenses in trepidation.

As though to soften the blow, Eddie starts on a sigh, "Honey..."

"Babycakes."

That gets a mini glare, and oh, it's getting a little fun.

"Richie."

"Eddie."

"I—"

"My love."

Eddie groans around his smile and pushes Richie's wavering grin away. "Stop. You can't annoy me into forgetting I'm scared when I know that's what you're doing, asshole."

Though that's definitely true of many of Richie's past annoyances, it's not quite the case now—it is, in fact, a grasp at normalcy for his own sake—but the excuse wakes the latent caretaker instinct in his little funnyman heart.

"No can do, homeskillet. That reflex is deeply ingrained, an on switch welded down by too much trauma and time to unflip."

"Richie, swear to fucking God..."

But Eddie's nervousness overrides his own and Richie jabs at the doorbell before he can think twice about it. It's always easier to overcome someone else's anxieties (especially Eddie, always Eddie, God, he'd do anything for this man) than his own.

The door opens immediately to reveal Maggie Tozier looking vaguely unimpressed in the way that Richie eventually learned was her trying to not jump immediately into whatever she wants to say.

"Greetings, Maman," Richie tries for something between funny and confident, for all that it works. "I have returned from my long and huh-weary travails."

She smiles. "Took you long enough."

"Mrs Tozier," Eddie shakes her hand on autopilot, to the bemusement of both Toziers and subtle mortification of Eddie himself, "it's great to see you again, you haven't aged a day."

"See? What do I always say?" Richie hangs his elbow around Eddie's neck and tries not to have a heart attack, tries not to think about how Eddie is on his left side so that's his left hand, uh— "From the mouths of babes and clowns, mother mine."

"Sure."

"Get it? I'm the clown, and he's the..."

Maggie Tozier, living saint, merely waves them through. "No, I got it."

Richie goes first, still trying to not have a heart attack. Through the blood in his ears he hears his mom tell Eddie, "Please, it's always been Maggie," and Eddie say just as quietly, "Okay, Maggie." When that exchange gives him a different flavor of heart attack, he tugs blindly at his shoelaces and babbles about whatever his eyes fall on first.

"Have there always been squirrels?"

"What?"

"In the..." He waves at the walls. "I remember acorns but not squirrels."

She continues to look at him like he's lost his mind before rolling her eyes.

"Yes, Richie, you caught me. We repapered the entire kitchen with one changed detail to just mess with you."

Eddie, hanging up his coat, snorts and gives him an _I told you so_ look.

Richie has the fleeting thought, _Oh god there's two of them_ , before it is promptly vaporized.

"You can't be mean to me," he says instead, trying to dodge Eddie's grabbing at his head. He _knows_ how Richie feels about hat hair. "Today of all days."

Eddie nabs his hat but ruffles the hair beneath before Richie can complain. It doesn't actually fix anything but does defer blame, which Eddie's eyebrows say was the point.

Unfortunately, while Richie was speaking and decidedly not thinking, he seems to have unknowingly incited a round of that beloved family pastime, Richie Poking.

"Oh, is this not a regular visit from my one and only son?" Maggie sits at the table, waving Eddie to the empty seat opposite her as Richie leans against the counter. "Do tell."

Richie sighs and leans against the counter. "I'm sorry, Mother, please let me introduce you to my lover and lifetime companion, Eddie. You've only known him since we were _seven_."

"Well thank you for letting me know, Richard, now would you like some banana bread?"

Richie whirls against the counter. "'Nana bread?!" With chocolate chips, god bless Maggie Tozier.

Occupied with finding a good knife, Richie misses the fondly resigned look his mother and husband share behind his back.

"Eat some, before your father gets to it."

"Where is dear old dad anyway?" Richie slathers his slice with butter and pops it in the microwave, the proper way. "It's not like Went to miss out on 'nana bread, or making fun of me."

"Your father shows his love through teasing, you of all people should understand," Maggie says with practised ease. "And he's getting his car washed, which he swore an hour ago would take half that."

"Ah," Richie says grandly, "the—" And here he waves his hand wordlessly in Eddie's direction.

"Paragon," Eddie supplies, somehow knowing exactly where Richie's ADHD was going with barely any direction. God, but he is good at that.

"Paragon of time management." The microwave dings and Richie immediately eats half the bread, ignoring the hot butter burning the roof of his mouth. "And how are Siouxsie, her banshees?"

Eddie's question mark face takes over from his disapproving one.

"Susannah is fine," his mom says mostly to Eddie. "Her second eldest, that's Abby, is looking at colleges."

"I know their names," Richie butts in.

"I think she was talking to me," Eddie says, as Maggie says, "Are you sure about that?"

"I'm godfather of one!" Richie folds his arms unimpressedly right back at her. "It's not just a symbolic gesture, you know."

"I mean, it explicitly is," Eddie chimes in.

"I'm the, the kuh-something, whatever! The Jewish version! I take my godfathering very seriously. I got to pick a name!"

Eddie is skeptical but silent, occupied with getting his own slice of bread.

Meanwhile, Richie's mother, traitor she is, continues, "Okay, which one?"

"...The biggest one." Hold on, he's thinking. "Jordan! Jordan T-something Tozier. Taylor! Ha! Taylor."

"Almost. You're still the only one who can give us name brand grandchildren."

Richie's mind smoothly elides over this last bit before sirens start going off, mostly because Eddie looks like he's doing some Deep Thought calculus. This might be the moment Richie's been waiting for.

"Oh my _god_ ," Eddie says with dawning horror, "you did _not_."

"Yes?"

"You tricked your sister into naming her firstborn after _Jonathan Taylor Thomas_?"

"Yes!"

Eddie holds up a finger in warning but Richie is already sliding across the kitchen to lift him in a bear hug. Richie's gonna get shredded solely from trying to annoyingly/seductively lift him.

"Put me _down_." Eddie knees his thigh with enough force to telegraph how much, exactly, he's holding back, but his toes are touching the ground. He has nothing to complain about.

"Absolutely not, I must bask. I've been waiting twenty years for someone to figure that out."

"Probably because her initials aren't actually JTT, asshole, put me down!"

Richie does, though he doesn't let go, instead kissing his forehead a bunch and saying, "Nah, just nobody gets me like you, babe."

"What did I say about calling me that?"[9]

Though this hardly counts, Richie releases him anyway with one last smacking kiss on the mouth. Eddie pretends to rub it off, but between the poorly hid smile underneath and the ring on the hand squeezing his bicep, Richie isn't too worried.

To seal the deal, Eddie then leans up to drop a small kiss on the corner of his mouth.

The thought _Huh, never done_ that _in front of Mom before_ pings in the back of his head and Richie looks up, but before the reflexive nervousness kicks in he sees her face. It's the kind face moms are supposed to have, warm and a little guarded and quietly knowing with the promise of future teasing at the edges.

When she sees Richie looking, she smiles and tilts her head. "The two of you are exactly the same."

It's a good thing, Richie knows it's a good thing, but still, he has to ask, "Is that a good thing?"

In lieu of answering, she goes over to the fridge and pulls a picture off the side that she hands to Richie.

It... Oh.

"Oh," Eddie echoes unknowingly. "Shit."

"From the boxes I was talking about," Maggie says, but it's white noise, his attention elsewhere.

It's them, unbelievably small, a little Richie hugging an even littler Eddie so tightly that he's not touching the ground, pristine Keds swinging as they both laugh so brightly Richie can almost hear it. They're in a little kid classroom, both wearing blocky primary colors (the uniform of children) and the still-pristine friendship bracelets Stan made them in Scouts.

Stan is there too, actually, slightly blurry as if shaking his head. He has his own bracelet, his hair longish but neat, and he looks so _Stan_ , world's tiniest adult, that sadness threatens to tear Richie's ribs open like an old, flimsy wasp nest.

"Jesus, look at you," Eddie says.

"Look at _you_."

"Your glasses are bigger than your face."

"Your overalls are cuter than _your_ face." Richie might be having a breakdown.

Eddie, slightly more composed, takes the photo and holds it to his face. "Fourth grade," he declares, "holiday party."

"Miss Jones," Richie supplies. From the look on Eddie's face (pained but fond) he's also hearing kid Richie singing the John Williams.

The look on little Richie's face makes big Richie's heart ache. The feeling returns vividly: the simple excitement of seeing Eddie every day at school, getting to sit next to him, be his friend, just be around him, until the feeling got too big for his body and he would have to do some stupid shit to get as much of Eddie's attention as he would give. To be honest, he mostly remembers it because he feels it every day, but he can't think about that right now or he'll start crying for real.

"You begged her to let Stan join from 'the babies class' and she made it New Year's themed as an excuse for the third grade teacher, whatever her name was."

Richie nods as gears start turning. "Very progressive."

There's something he's forgetting, a feeling he hates the familiarity of, something heavy and unsettled swimming at the edges of his vividly patchwork memory. As always, though, Eddie beats him to the punch.

"She had us count down to noon instead of midnight and then you—"

Richie remembers.

"—hugged me so hard you picked me up, and when I yelled at you to put me down you spun around in circles until we were both dizzy."

Richie remembers now that unknowable magnet feeling like he was the South to Eddie's North. He remembers it made him nauseated; it made him antsy. It left him stuck in his head and screeching, clawing his way out in whatever form he could get—tickling Eddie until he got kicked in the face, eating the nearest gross thing he was dared to (usually by himself), licking the hand slapped over his mouth, poking and prodding and picking him up, as the case may be.

Eddie is still talking. He does that sometimes when he's nervous about something, words falling out of him without any kind of conscious choice.

"I think I already knew people kissed at midnight, but I didn't get until way later that that's how I was thinking of it. I just remember feeling like..."

He cuts himself off and Richie finally drags his eyes away from the photo to see, well, an even prettier picture, Eddie Blush No. 4 (inexplicably shy), and everything else fades away: time, space, audience, script. Like when it's too dark in their bedroom to know up from down and one of them says something that doesn't seem so sad when it's only them.

Richie presses their elbows together briefly, like he does on those nights, and Eddie sighs, lips quirking when he looks up.

"Like my head was gonna keep spinning anyway so you should never stop," he finishes, a little ruefully.

"I wouldn't have," Richie says, "if I knew," and it means the fourth grade, the sewers, the long grey bout of amnesia in between.

Their elbows press close as they both look at the photo again, then Eddie's arm slides past to settle around his waist. Without thinking, Richie sets his elbow on Eddie's far shoulder, hand on his head, completely natural despite the contrived-looking angles of their bodies. The silence is both serious and quiet—two things Richie never is—but it's nice, as he always tries to be, which has to count for something.

The longer he looks at it the more Richie could swear he can remember the feeling of Eddie's little noodle arms around his neck, his shoulders when they started to spin. His whole head goes quiet, even the barely-literate goblin that's been hopping up and down, pointing, _Husbands! Husbands! Baby husbands!_ since he saw it.

His ring clinks against Eddie's skull and Eddie squeezes back. No, all is quiet in Richieland.

"There's more in the boxes upstairs," Maggie says eventually, and then... Her hand comes up, falls back, and then rises again to rest on Richie's shoulder. "You should take them home."

The word rings like the bright silver sound of a call bell, bouncing smoothly off the walls. She stays there for a moment and Richie knows she feels it, Eddie too, the something more in the room than the simple sum of its occupants, something Else built up between them. He's always thought of it as a Loser thing, related to the cosmic power of friendship as it seemed, but when he meets his mother's eyes the air thins the way it does when they all snap to the same wavelength and...

Well, he doesn't quite know what to do with it, but she just squeezes his shoulder and goes to get one of the boxes to give them a moment.[10]

She lies in wait until Richie's dad arrives and is availing a much more relaxed Eddie of his top ten stupid things they did as kids and she can lure him aside with more bread. He's loath to abandon Eddie to his father's machinations—much like Richie himself, his dad can be kind of "a lot"—chocolate chips wait for no man.

Once his mouth is full and he can't joke his way out of this the second he hears her tone she says, "I never understood you. When you were a kid, I never really... got it. Not like your father."

"Mom, you don't—" Richie starts around a mouthful of mushy bread but stops to swallow, joke here.

"All I'm saying is I'm glad you found someone who did. Does." She waves off his stifled protest. "All of your friends do, I know, but I'm glad you're not lonely—that you have someone to care for the way I know you've always wanted, and that will care for you right back. I'm happy for you, and I'm your _mother_ ," she continues louder over the slow crescendo of Richie's whine, turning to him with a warning finger, "I'm allowed to be sentimen— You got _married_ yesterday, Richard Wentworth, and didn't even invite me, so don't you start."

Sufficiently mollified and mortified, Richie zips his mouth shut, but she doesn't need to say anything more; she knows the damage is already done. Her words sink in slowly through the half-melted strawberry marshmallow Richie's insides have been reduced to, thick glossy pink and sticky sweet, but when they do Richie mentally gulps like a cartoon character and steels himself for Genuine Emotional Expression.

"I don't know, I think maybe you 'get it'." He pries a chocolate chip free from the remaining loaf, ignoring his mom's admonishing look as she does the same. "The, uh. Caring thing. You know, like..." He eats another chip. "Yep, nailed it, got it in one."

Maggie shrugs. "I have my moments. I'm still your mother, after all."

"Not all moms do," is all Richie says, but it's enough; she'd gotten the less-than-polite rundown earlier and simply glances at Eddie across the room, gesticulating something to Went. Richie can't help but follow her gaze, drawn like a magnet to Eddie as always but his hands most of all: hands whose touch he's always been after, pulling him close, smoothing bandaids and slapping away obnoxious tugs, now flashing in the mid-morning light in his parents' kitchen, of all places, so almost familiar and yet intoxicatingly new.

Richie leans back against the counter, head ostensibly tilted toward his mom still but not bothering to look away. She doesn't say anything, just hooks her arm through his easily.

"You've got a good man there, honey. You two are going to be just fine." Her eyebrows quirk up as she fixes her sights on Richie again. "Though that won't make up for the fact that you got married without us."

Richie sighs with his whole upper body and her lip twitches. "Look, if we have a real wedding with you guys there, would that be enough to stem the eternal torment?"

"Hm. We'll see." She nods and then, because she's his mom, tugs at the hair flopping over his forehead and frowns. "And would it kill you to get a haircut beforehand? Really, Richie..." 

Richie quickly absconds with his bread to the other side of the room, wandering right into a story about him as a kid writing "Richie Kaspbrak" in his notebook several times and eating the pages when confronted. Eddie, with a softly restraining grasp on Richie's elbow, simpers about Richie liking him so much he ate paper for him, Richie counters that he ate paper all the time, and everyone chimes in with examples, including when Eddie once shot a spitball at him that went right in his open mouth.[11]

Richie remembers that one. _Swapping spit_ , he would later think giddily to himself, but the reason he remembers it is less the secretly thrilling implication of the pun and more the look on Eddie's face: absolutely disgusted but in thrall anyway. His mouth had twisted open in both a grimace and grin, and Richie remembers it perfectly because it's a face he still makes all the time: when he can't help laughing at Richie's awful joke, when he's the one making something innuendo, when Richie goes to kiss his cheek and licks him instead.

He's making right now. It says (mystified, bordering on disgust) _oh my god, I can't believe I love you_ as strongly as (in awe) _oh my god, I can't believe I get to love you_. It makes Richie's marshmallow insides bubble like a B-movie goop monster, heat radiating awkwardly across his face where everyone can see.

The look softens as the conversation moves on and Eddie glances at the photo's edge poking out of Richie's shirt pocket, pensive, warm. The look now says, as Eddie will explicate later, _You really are the love of my life—all of it. Forever in both directions, future and past_. Richie just hopes the way he squeezes Eddie's hand says what he hopes it does: _I loved you, I did, I swear I did, I do_. Eddie squeezes back, _I know, I know_.

* * *

8 Sometimes Canadian Richie was gay, but that was almost worse. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, age thirteen and thirty and so on, he'd stare at the ceiling trying to imagine what that would be like and the whole thing would fall apart, like not even Canadian Richie was strong enough to suspend that much disbelief.

9 "Not in public."

10 The moment:

"Don't cry."

"Shut the fuck up, I'm not gonna cry."

"Seriously, you can't cry, that's my thing, I'm the one who cries."

"I'm not gonna cry!"

"You better not! I'm already misty-eyed over all your little baby freckles, if you say anything right now I will _lose it_."

11 He really did eat a lot of paper back in the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhh it's accidentally been a month since I updated this???? which genuinely seems wrong but there we are I guess. I really think of this + the eddie half + the spin off as one whole fic so it doesn't feel like it's been that long
> 
> swear to GOD eventually I'm gonna write the fic where they actually elope, I know basically all that happens in it I just haven't worked on it yet bc writing all the losers is A Lot (see: [the last spin off of this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25476490))
> 
> other updates uh:  
> -richie espouses the author's doubts about book canon magics (and yes inb4 I know it's so they'd have nothing tying them down in the outside world so they WOULD return to derry I'm just saying, would a little consistence kill It?)  
> -richie is also right in that that's the only way to eat banana bread  
> -richie's parents living in canada and richie and eddie eloping to niagara previous seen [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21110438)  
> -"from the mouths of babes and clowns" (in my mind at least) comes from the west wing. one day i will write a terrible veep-esque au where they are president and doctor bartlet! one day!  
> -miss jones and the new years noon party comes from my own childhood, only recently usurped as the most romantic thing to ever happen to me  
> -for an example of bubbling marshmallow b-movie goop, see _the stuff_
> 
> also [I am on clown town twitter now](https://twitter.com/Iamphouse)! yep, made a fandom specific public twitter acct like it's 2014 all over again. come say hi and read, like, messy google doc wip screenshots


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> turn work skin on etc etc — you guys know the drill by now, right?
> 
> uhhhh brief mentions of canon injuries? again, richie's quasi psychic powers

**V.** November

_And all the quiet nights you bear  
Seal them up with care  
No one needs to know they're there  
For I will hold them for you_

Mitski, "I Will"  
  
---  
  
Richie's calling it. This month sucks. The nightmares are inexplicably worsening, he's officially no longer on hiatus from adult career responsibilities, his new houseplant died, they stopped selling his toothpaste at CVS, plus the usual geopolitical and existential dread. There's so much going on, he hasn't even had the energy for his favorite pastime: annoying Eddie with lunch at work (which is definitely about getting in as many embarrassing anecdotes as possible with his coworkers and not the way his heart fucking flutters when Eddie meets him at the elevators with a kiss on the cheek). Richie _wants_ to, he's just too exhausted to do much of anything.

He probably should've paid more attention to Eddie's most recent sleep hygiene spiel, but in his defense Eddie had his sleeves rolled up and pulled off his tie halfway through and Richie's only human, okay? It's not like it'd help anyway—unless the rest of the Losers were secretly in it, no way any study was covering his particular brand of PTSD nightmare.

So, when the door of the shower slides open and lets in the comparatively freezing air, Richie is too tired to be totally surprised.

" _Hey_."

"Hey yourself," says his naked husband.

"Fancy seeing you here."

Richie leans into the hot water, both to make room for Eddie and avoid the cold. Well. As much as he can. Eddie is cold too—Eddie is _freezing_ , recently in from the dreary New York November that Richie was trying to escape from originally—but he's still Eddie.

"If you're trying to kill me, there are easier ways to do it than DIY cryogenics."

"Don't be such a baby," Eddie says as he pushes Richie further under the spray until he can reach it too.

"The only baby I am is yours, sweet cheeks."

Even though Eddie's face is out of sight, the way he wraps his arms around Richie's waist says it all, as does the smile Richie can feel before Eddie kisses his shoulder.

The steam re-acculumates as Eddie quietly dethaws for a moment. When his cold nose moves from Richie's back to his neck, the top of Eddie's head moving into the spray, Richie takes a deep breath.

"Hey, tiny dancer," he says, valiantly clinging to his train of thought when Eddie does, in fact, hold him a little closer. "You good back there?"

"Mm. Cold."

"Well it _is_ November."

Eddie blows a raspberry and Richie grins as the solid shape of him at Richie's back shifts. He turns to watch, through the curtain of water, as Eddie pushes back his wet hair and rubs his eyes. His nose is red from the temperature change and his eyes are crinkly and Richie loves him so much it feels like he's standing directly under the showerhead with his mouth open, drowning.

"Hi."

Like an overwrought romcom heroine, Richie sighs, "Hi."

Eddie kisses him because Eddie loves kissing him. He once, half asleep, proclaimed that as long as he could kiss Richie he'd never need anything else, which Richie had tucked away in his heart to look at when his mind tried to convince him to fuck things up before they do the same to him.

"Why are you taking a shower at five o'clock?"

He doesn't remember the actual decision-making process—doesn't even know how long he's been in there—but it probably wasn't a great reason anyway, so he shrugs. "Tired. Bored. Cold."

Eddie blinks water from his eyes before rolling them. "Now where have I heard that one before?"

"Is it weird to be tired at, like, four thirty? I'm not even depressed."

He's taking a shower at five o'clock, he's definitely depressed, but Eddie'll get what he means. Point of fact:

"It's dark out so your mind thinks it's bedtime," Eddie says, so definitively Richie won't even quibble that grownups don't have bedtimes.[12]

Instead he hums agreeably and smooths over Eddie's hair, lingering. Eddie's hands are still cold when they land on his waist but he tries valiantly not to flinch and mostly succeeds.

Eddie squeezes him anyway and says, "This is nice."

"Yeah?" His fingers scrape lightly over Eddie's ear. "I wonder why."

Eddie pinches him a tiny bit. "Not the company, that's for sure."

" _Well_. I see how it is." His voice rises to meet the level of sarcasm in Eddie's look. "Sorry if I'm boring you. Normally I'd brainstorm better ways of getting your dick wet—"

"Is that why you keep bringing up how tired you are?" Eddie interrupts to ask. "I'm not in here to have sex with you."

Richie blinks the water from his eyes and the confusion from his head. "Okay, well, in my defense, that's usually what happens when we're both naked and standing this close. Or if one of us is naked. Or if we're both dressed but this close. Any combination of those two things."

Rather than try to pick apart what any of that means, Eddie pushes his shoulder with one hand, twirling one finger of the other. Richie obediently turns, following Eddie's nudges until his face is out of the spray.

"Too tall for this," Eddie mumbles, but before Richie can ask he feels first something cold and then Eddie's hands in his hair. Oh.

Richie isn't going to cry—he refuses—but it's so much more than he would've thought. He likes to joke about Eddie having talented hands, but it's true; he's always deliberate in his movements, but his methodical intensity is magnified a hundred times by the nerves in Richie's scalp. As if Eddie wasn't larger than life enough already.

Instead of saying any of this, Richie tells the ceiling, "I don't think anyone's washed my hair for me since I was eight."

"Do you not get haircuts?"

Richie shrugs. "Costs extra."

"If you go to Supercuts maybe." Eddie turns Richie's head so he can look at him suspiciously over his shoulder. "Please tell me you don't get your hair cut at Supercuts."

His eyebrows are all the more impressive with his hair slicked down, dominating his face, and Richie watches as a stray drop of water traces the line he would if he could. He's pretty boneless, though, and 80% sure if he tries to speak he'll start crying, so he shakes his head and lets Eddie nudge him back into place.

Eddie is diligent: in general, about his personal care, about shampooing Richie's hair. He rubs little circles all over Richie's scalp, runs his nails in rows down to Richie's neck, tips his head back with one hand on his forehead and holds it there as he washes the bubbles out and gets ready for lather rinse number two—which he insists isn't actually marketing BS and has converted Richie to with the positive reinforcement of hair petting.

"Maybe I should get you to cut my hair." Richie stares at the tiny drops of condensation above the showerhead. "You sure seem to know your way around a head."

"Ha, ha." Eddie smooths back the hair behind Richie's ear. "Nope, just yours."

He _is_ good at it, though. Scratchy fingers, steady hands, wiping bubbles away before they get in Richie's eyes. It's all methodical rhythm and loving efficiency and green apple scent, and Richie would honestly fall asleep right there if it weren't for the sticky cared-for lump in his throat.

He tries to keep that last part underwraps as Eddie turns him around for his final rinse, but it's harder when they're face to face. Eddie had a sixth sense for seeing through Richie's bullshit even before they remembered each other and Richie laying out his whole heart for his study doesn't help. Thankfully Eddie's hand shielding his eyes from the water buys him time to get it together.

"I always forget how long your hair is when it's wet," Eddie says lowly as he cards through Richie's hair under the water even after the bubbles are gone.

"One day I'll land that shampoo commercial," Richie mumbles.

When Eddie tucks Richie's hair over his ear, his ring glances the thin skin in a blip of relative cold. That one touch yanks the string wrapped around Richie's heart, tugging it up and out of his throat, because of all he knows.

Eddie had told him one night, early on, about how he used to always take his wedding ring off to wash dishes because he could convince himself it made sense: it was more sanitary, he wouldn't lose it down the sink, etc. He'd put it in his pocket for later and later until he would forget entirely until he found it in the laundry a couple days later and guiltily slipped it back on. It never came up again, but Richie still feels a pang whenever he watches Eddie doing dishes and sees his ring glinting silver through the bubbles.

Richie really must be getting soft because that thought undoes him. He tips over from the middle, collapses like a demoed building, like an vacuumed-out accordion, squeezebox flattened too quickly for noise. His forehead lands against Eddie's briefly before sliding down to his shoulder where the tears mingle with the showerhead's continued white noise. He is not crying. He's just tired.

He knows the face Eddie is making right now, equal parts confused and concerned but ready to switch to whichever fits best. His hands come down awkwardly to settle on Richie's shoulders, holding on lightly.

"You okay?"

With a sound that means nothing at all, he settles his head more solidly on Eddie's collarbone. It's almost like a nod that way.

"Rich..."

"Mm."

"Okay." His voice gets softer, but not soft. "I'm gonna turn off the water."

When Richie hums again, he does, one hand sneaking past the curtain afterward to grab a towel. He feels it graze his arm as Eddie awkwardly maneuvers to drape it over Richie while Richie is draped over him. Richie would help but he can't bring himself to move and probably won't until Eddie makes him—like now.

He pulls the towel over his face as Eddie steps carefully out of the shower and pulls Richie with him.

"Drips," he mumbles. Richie buries his head further in the towel and rubs his feet on the bathmat, relishing the texture. "Okay. Come on."

It's not too late yet to turn this around into something better. With some machinations he could crowd Eddie onto the bed, up against the headboard, hold him with one arm spread across his back and Richie's face in his shoulder, and they could both forget—

"You're not gonna seduce your way out of talking this time, Tozier, so don't even try," Eddie says as he nudges Richie ahead of him into the bedroom proper.

Out of the harsh bathroom light, enough of a semblance of normalcy returns that Richie can tie the towel around his hips on autopilot. "First time for everything."

Bluff. Bluff bluff bluff, and _no one's buying it, kid_ , but it's reflex. Richie couldn't seduce his way out of a paper bag, but luckily Eddie is easy as shit. All it took was one brief, thirty year, mostly accidental long con and already he had that shit on matrimonial lock.

As he flops down beside his glasses, Richie considers saying this last bit, but it gets too tangled in the more morose thoughts bouncing around his skull to voice. Instead he says lamlely, "If we'd had sex like normal people, this wouldn't've happened."

"Right, because you've never suddenly started crying during sex."

Richie knows without looking that Eddie is drying his hair with his special hair towel—squeezing, not rubbing, which is apparently an important distinction.

Also an important distinction: technically, Richie didn't cry. Tears came out of his eyes, it's different. He mumbles something to that effect but it comes out as little more than sound.

Even still, Eddie says, "I know," and drapes the towel over Richie's head, lingering long enough to see the quarter of a smile that gets before heading for the dresser.

Richie pulls the hand towel off his face to watch. "Hey, lover."

"Hey. Calvin and Hobbes or roller derby?"

"2009 Windy City Champs Manic Attackers, please," Richie says, feeling like a fucking kid, like it matters what pattern his PJs are. It kind of does, though, and Eddie gets that, which is why he asked in the first place.

Eddie drops the shirt, faded light blue with a substantial hole in the right cuff and spiderweb cracks through the nome de puns, and some boxers in Richie's lap before tugging at the nearest corner of his towel. "Scootch."

Richie lets Eddie pull the towel out from under him and watches Eddie putter around in glimpses as he dresses. He's got pajama pants (he likes having pockets) and a fitted t-shirt that would usually have Richie drooling but now makes him feel ridiculously mortal. All he can see is the jagged canyon that isn't there, seeing past the thin scar creeping its way across Eddie's lower back and the shiny patch on his shoulder from being rolled to the ground like he was, Richie swears he was. Wait til the next optometrist to ask if he's had any double vision recently gets a load of this one.

In an attempt to banish the image (though such attempts rarely work), Richie asks the first thing that comes to mind from inside his shirt. "Remember that kid who got pneumonia in fifth grade?"

"Owen Phillips. He played baseball." Eddie hangs up their towels and shuts off the bathroom light. Without it the room is the purple grey of winter, bisected by faux-incandescent yellow from the hallway. "Remember how my mom wouldn't let me out of the house for two weeks after?"

"That's _why_ I remember. That and cuz you yelled at me for being a 'reckless idiot' when me and Bill would take the shortcut outside after swimming days in gym."

"You deserved it. That was stupid even without the looming threat of pneumonia."

Richie shrugs, poking himself in the face adjusting glasses that aren't there. He accepted his lot in life long ago, but he can't help adding his weak explanation, "You didn't yell at Bill."

"I don't think it ever occurred to me," Eddie yanks the comforter free from under the pillows like a magician with a tablecloth, "that Bill could do something as ordinary as die."

"Yeah..." Richie breathes in and turns to cleaning his glasses on the edge of his shirt. Thus occupied, he shrugs again more quietly. "It— I dunno. Made me feel special, I guess."

The rustling stops. The bed dips backwards as Eddie climbs up behind him with the shuffle of clothes-on-comforter, so loud here it feels like the only sound in the world. Eyes locked on his hands, Richie catches the corner of Eddie's blurry face, perpendicular, facing his own.

"I yelled at you the most because you did the most stupid shit," Eddie brushes his hair over his ear, "but I also worried more about regular stuff when it came to you because it was _you_."

When Richie turns to look at him, Eddie is smiling quietly, and his hand rests on Richie's back like an electric blanket, soft with the suggestion of something more solid underneath and so, so warm.

"And you liked me the mostest."

"Still do." Eddie presses his lips to Richie's temple. "Come to bed."

He sits back just in time to dodge getting flattened by Richie's fall backwards. _Even upside down he's handsome_ , Richie thinks to himself, then sits back up to rub his forehead with both hands. "We didn't even have dinner."

"Whatever. We'll get up later." Eddie pulls at the blanket underneath Richie, then Richie himself. "Not even a nap, a... rest."

"In the dark, with my eyes closed, lying down? Pretty sure that's a nap, sweet pea."

"Not if you don't fall asleep, old man." With one more tug Richie falls easily, shuffling around so Eddie is at his back. "Now lie there and take it."

"Sir yes sir," he says with halfhearted Animaniac lasciviousness, but he shuts his eyes and leans back into the warmth. Gold-purple shadows swim before him as Eddie keeps moving, prying Richie's glasses out of his hands, fiddling with something on the nightstand, etc, just enough stimulation to distract Richie from his own thoughts.

"Light's on," he says, waiting until Eddie is settled to feel as much of that exasperated sigh on his neck as possible. "S'killing polar bears."

"The only thing leaving a light on hurts is our bill, it's fine."

"Mm. Lights use energy, energy comes from burning coal, burning coal eats the ozone, icebergs melt. Polar bears die."

"Jesus. Alright, Captain Planet."

"I'm just saying, the microw—"

"You and the microwave light." Eddie kisses the back of his head and then the warmth at his back dims, leaning away. Richie whines with his mouth closed, keeping Eddie's other arm trapped under his own. "Well what do you want me to—?"

"No, okay, fine."

When Richie releases him, though, Eddie doesn't go any farther than the door, which he shuts until that distant light is a sliver around its edges. He doesn't move when Eddie clambers back into bed behind him, though he does lean into Eddie's hand then rubbing small circles between his shoulders.

His hand stills after a moment. "Will you tell me something?"

Richie turns over to face the vague shape in his own shadow. "What?"

"Not like..." The Eddie shape shakes his head, probably. "Tell me something. Anything." After a beat he adds, "You're being quiet, it's weird."

"Aren't you usually begging me to shut up?"

Eddie gently pokes between his eyebrows. "Tell me anything."

"Uh..." Richie's mind is blank as Eddie cups the back of his head, carding through his hair. He fits his own hand on the rounded joint of Eddie's shoulder and looks carefully elsewhere, like he'll find his line on the blank, dark, fuzzy wall behind Eddie's head. "I don't know, man, anything is a big category."

"Tell me something about me," Eddie says, his thumb scrubbing through Richie's hair a little too roughly to be comforting, like he's trying to keep Richie's attention, like he doesn't always have it. He can be kind of stupid sometimes. Maybe that's what Richie should say.

"About you?"

"Yeah, tell me something you notice about me. I wanna know how the great Richie Tozier sees me."

"Okay, you little narcissist." Eddie rolls his eyes and shrugs back into Richie's hand. "Uh, one of your dimples is deeper than the other."

Eddie smiles; said dimples to appear. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, dude." To prove it, Richie sticks a thumb in each one, which somehow only makes Eddie smile more. "You can't tell from looking but you can feel it, this one—" He presses on the left. "—is a teensy bit deeper than this one." He presses on the right.

"Very scientific," Eddie says as his eyes flutter and he leans into the touch.

Richie lights up, and although he can feel that it's just a few bulbs instead of the whole Christmas tree, it's still nice. " _So_ scientific, babe. I have a degree in Eddieology, you know."

"A Master's at least."

He means it, and he's being so _sweet_ , which is always a precious sight, but Richie deflates the second he thinks about it more.

"Hey." Eddie nudges Richie's knee with his own. "What's up, buttercup?"

Bite the bullet, Richard. He sighs and stares at Eddie's forehead.

"Sometimes I have no idea what goes on in your sweet little skull." Richie's thumb fits to the thin place above his cheekbone, right past his eye. "Not all the time, and I don't think that's a _bad_ thing—sometimes it's cool. You always surprise me, man. But sometimes... I guess I worry."

 _That this is all a dream, that you'll wake up and realize that you never wanted this, that I'm not what you thought, and this was never where you were supposed to end up, and I'm gonna be left holding the bag on the one glimpse of real happiness I'll ever get_ , he doesn't say. It feels too rude—like, what, he thinks Eddie can't make his own goddamn decisions? That he can't decide for himself what he wants?—and insulting, but that doesn't stop Richie's fears from believing it.

In the enigmatically dim light, though, he can't tell if Eddie picks up on all that anyway, or if he only hears the outline Richie gives. The silence kills him more than usual.

"Mhm." Eddie covers Richie's hand with his own and blinks slowly at him until Richie meets his speed. "The Other."

"Hm?"

"Sartre?"

Richie's eyes blink closed but not open. "M'illiterate, Eds, you know that."

"Dumbass," Eddie says, fondness palpable in his voice. "Intro to Existential Philosophy, dude. _Being and Nothingness_."

"Wow, sound more like a business major bro, I dare you."

"Fuck you too, babe." Eddie works his hand around to thread their fingers together and kisses the back of Richie's hand before tucking them both against his chest. "It's one of those being-for-whatever things, the idea that other people perceiving us is a threat so we have to objectify them, make a 3D person into a 2D one. And we know other people do the same thing so we try to objectify ourselves too, even though we can't."

That hits a little close to home. "Cheers I'll drink to that."

"But it's total bullshit," he continues, and his other hand comes up to scratch soothingly over Richie's head. "He thought that people identifying with this imaginary version of themselves is fundamentally bad, and that's why sex is, whatever, existentially horrifying, and other bullshit. But none of that _has_ to be true. It isn't always a bad thing, and it isn't always wrong."

His voice pauses, though his movements don't.

"That might be a Billy Joel song. Not the point."

When Richie opens his eyes again the room is bright, overexposed to his dark-adjusted eyes. Eddie is a big purple-y blur at first, that thin line of yellow falling far back on his cheek—a bright line tracing the border of his face where an evil scientist would laser it off to swap it with somebody else's. This, for some reason, is beautiful to Richie.[13]

"What is the point?"

"I don't know," Eddie sighs, and it's more comforting than an actual explanation could have ever been.

"Kay."

"I guess... If there's a gap between the 'real' me and the person you see, it's not always bad. It's not necessarily _mis_ interpretation, just interpretation. Sometimes the other me is better, and I wanna be that, for you. You make me want to be the person you love."

"You already are," he says softly, watching Eddie's chin. When it moves like he's smiling, Richie tips forward to press his forehead to Eddie's shoulder. Soft, worn Eddie. Solid all the way through. "Sartre was an idiot."

"He sure fucking was."

After another second, Richie turns around and scooches back into the arm already coming up around him. Eddie's hands land where they always do, one fisted in Richie's shirt over his stomach and one flat on Richie's back, tucked safely between their bodies.

"Hey Eds?"

After one last soothing rub over his shoulder blade, Eddie's temple leans up against Richie's neck. "Yeah Rich?"

"You doing anything for lunch tomorrow?"

Eddie presses his smile into Richie's shoulder and inhales deeply for a moment. "Mm. Yeah, gotta hot date. Why?"

"Oh yeah? Do I know him?"

"Hm, maybe? His name's Richie Tozier?" Eddie shrugs, which Richie feels, the drag of their shirts together warm and rough. "He's kinda famous."

Richie hums. "Never heard of him. Is he nice?"

"Nah." Eddie kisses the back of his neck as Richie laughs quietly. "He's kind of an asshole. But he's sweet. I think he might really like me."

Something gets stuck at the top of Richie's throat and he wraps his hand around Eddie's tightly, their arms overlapping until they physically must diverge at the shoulder. "That's good. You deserve it."

"Can I tell you a secret?" Eddie asks, hooking his chin over Richie's shoulder. "I really like him back."

Richie swallows, hard, and presses their cheeks together. Even now, adolescent giddiness creeps in at the words. Sure, he's always wanted everyone to like him, but he thinks if it was only ever Eddie, he'd be fine.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup," Eddie confirms with a little nod that digs his chin into Richie's shoulder, because he loves him loves him _loves_ him.

"More or less than you like Shake Shack?"

"Oh, definitely less."

Richie rolls over immediately with a snort, catching Eddie's grin as it goes toothy. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Eddie tries to school his face into something resembling chagrin. "If it's a choice between you and ShakeSauce..." He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I love you, but it's gonna be the sauce every time."

Before he can start to happy-cry in earnest, Richie grabs Eddie's face and reels him in. It's intense but nonsexual, a combination Richie doesn't have a lot of experience with; if it weren't for the fact that it matched up with every romantic movie made before 1980 that Richie would never admit to having seen, he'd probably say it was Eddie exclusive. Now, though, he's gotta admit that sure, they had a point, but also Humphrey Bogart's got nothing on Richie's man. Take that, Burt Lancaster.

None of that makes enough sense to say aloud, though, so instead he presses as close to Eddie as he can—and really, doesn't that say more than words ever can?

...Well, no. Not really. And Richie knows that, and he's working on saying his feelings for real instead of either making a joke of them or shutting up completely, so he pulls away to say—

"I love you."

Eddie beats him to the punch, and when he pulls back even further, Richie can tell that he knows exactly what he's done by the steadiness of his gaze and the way his hands don't so much as twitch even though some of his hair has fallen into his eyes. His arms stay safe and strong around Richie's back, hands spread wide to cover as much ground as possible.

Richie dives back in almost immediately, but it's softer, less desperate. His already-wet lips slide easily across Eddie's, smooth and familiar and sturdy.

"I love you too," he says when they part again. Eddie nods against his forehead and Richie adds, "Way more than Shake Shack."

Eddie huffs a laugh, reaching up to the back of Richie's head to hold him in place as Eddie brushes their noses together. "More than sleep?"

"You said we weren't gonna sleep," Richie argues, tucking one of his shins between Eddie's as the other man rolls his eyes.

"'Rest', then. You're no fun when you're tired."

"M'always fun," Richie says, but he nods, blinks growing longer. His hands fall from their grip to tuck loosely around Eddie's sides, feeling the slowing rise and fall of his chest's slow resting state and internalizing it himself.

Eyes carefully on his hand running through Richie's hair, Eddie says, "Sure you are, honey. Do you want to hear about the report I worked on today?"

They only do that when the nightmares get bad. Richie had said once, sweaty and disorientingly awake at two in the morning, that the soporific minutiae of Eddie's work was better than any lullaby, but (as happened increasingly often) Eddie had seen right through the joke to the grotesque, mushy sincerity beneath and done it. And it worked. Like his unconscious brain knows that it's too boring to be anything but real, he would say if he was joking, and that the only way they could be here is if the nightmares were false, if he wasn't. Being held helped too, but it was easier for his panicky subconscious to misinterpret as being trapped; spreadsheet play-by-play was apparently impossible to mistake. Occasionally Eddie strays off topic—once he recited the plot of the first season of _Battlestar Galactica_ —but anything would do, so long as it was something innocuous in Eddie's voice. As long as it was Eddie: a running theme in Richie's life.

But tonight Richie just needs the outline of Eddie's ribs under his hands and his snoring in his ears. Eddie had once said that he liked "how much of" Richie there was because when Eddie held him it felt the way Eddie felt inside: that he was almost bursting at the seams, full up to the brim with feeling but able to hold it all with his arms. When Richie holds Eddie he feels like sand in a riverbed. Flat and heavy. Sedimentary. Still.

"Nah, I'm okay."

Eddie gives him a peck. "You are," he says before shuffling until their knees lock together. "Close your eyes."

Maybe they'll get up soon; maybe they won't wake up until morning, with annoyed stomachs and numb arms and someone's hair in someone else's mouth. Maybe they'll be fit together like cutlery or flopped all over each other or something less neatly described. Every day is different, but Richie knows at least that when he wakes up Eddie will be there, warm and close at hand.

* * *

12 They don't say "grownups" either, but hey, he never professed to be one.

13 General love and affection, objective attractiveness, the fact that he once went through a bad breakup while working in a movie theater and ended up hiding in the back row of a dozen showings of _Face/Off_ to cry and now has a weird complex about it—take your pick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh gang, we're in the home stretch :( last eddie chapter sunday and last richie chapter wednesday is what I'm hoping for, as then we're ending on the 1 yr anniversary of the first time I watched the shitty cam of ch 2 that was missing like ten minutes! how time flies...
> 
> notes:  
> -like three months ago I realized I was completely writing around what happened to be my own worse depressive episode, so naturally I wrote a chapter about it  
> -manic attackers are a real roller derby team in chicago, though I've no idea how good they are  
> -eddie remembers about as much from intro to existentialism as I do, which is to say, very little, and is indeed thinking of a billy joel song
> 
> the views of the characters DO reflect the views of the author, namely: fuck sartre
> 
> see you sunday!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Anne Carson also said, "To be seen _feeling_ anything strips you naked."

**i.** May

_I'm like a watch that's overwound  
And I've got both feet off the ground  
Because you see_

Supertramp, "Oh Darling"  
  
---  
  
The first time Richie and Eddie have sex they don't have sex. Not even because Richie insists on calling it "making love" or anything: they don't get that far.

Reset the scene. Still in Derry. After some negotiating, Richie is lying on his back, Eddie on his side tucked all around him. At some point after they finally migrated to the bed Richie had tried to roll them over, holding Eddie beneath him (safe, warm _Eddie_ , who has lips like an angel), only to be thwarted by Eddie's sudden bout of dizziness and his own headache. With a round of (honestly, totally founded) inspection, Eddie declared Richie TBI-free "probably" and diagnosed them both dehydrated. Richie made thirsty jokes, Eddie kicked him in the shins, and they both groaned their way back into standing to get a drink. Neither of them were willing to leave the room—to leave each other or to run into one of the other Losers, who would undoubtedly know what had happened the second they made eye contact—so they chugged some overpriced water from the mini-bar because fuck it, right? They basically saved the world, they deserve some ten dollar Evian.

This is what happens the first time Richie and Eddie have-sex-but-don't-really-have-sex. Richie isn't entirely sure why he counts it that way, but he knows it has something to do with this:

They are in bed. Richie has his arm over Eddie's shoulders, one hand on his arm and one on his hand, having been deemed impossible and reshuffled so his arm "won't snap off the second you wake up and try to move, idiot". It's like he's laying down like he normally would—or like "normally" for someone other than Richie, who's an octopus in bed in an unsexy way—except Eddie is there, folded into the equation like a mildly obtrusive guest.

Mentally, however, he's very obtrusive. He's so warm and weighty and he's wearing one of Richie's stupid t-shirts (Garfield the cat on a mat that says "Garfield for President" because his freshman year neighbor Garfield did, in fact, run for student president), which slopes around his shoulders oddly from shuffling around. Richie can see how the cord of his neck runs down to the clavicle he now knows tastes as perfect as it looks. He's Eddie, real and alive and in Richie's arms in his bed, and each one of those things is big enough on its own to overload Richie's senses.

It's a miracle he doesn't implode right now, doesn't have steam pouring out of his ears, isn't screaming to high heavens how much this is. It's a miracle he's here at all.

He can feel Eddie staring at the side of his face, which is not quite _un_ -creepy but at least lacks the _someone is looking at me oh god say something funny_ feeling that usually accompanies eyes on him. He cannot look back because if seeing Eddie's face means seeing Eddie's mouth, means remembering how it feels touching his own and how Eddie's head feels in his hands, and then he'll spiral and spiral further down the drain with the lovestruck, dickdrunk thoughts and never swim his way back up to functional cognition again.

And so, with that on the line, Richie, miraculously, waits. His thoughts are still running in Eddie-centric circles, yes, but they extend now beyond cataloging everywhere they've touched. He's suddenly reminded of that scene in _When Harry Met Sally_ after they have sex and she's all happy and he's staring at the ceiling counting the seconds before he can escape. It's the same, like, arrangement of bodies they've got going on. Oh god, does he look like that? Fuck, that's definitely the face he's making right now, but to stop he'd have to think about anything else, and he physically can't right now because holy shit, he kissed Eddie Kaspbrak.

At least he's got a shirt on. And underwear—no pants, which are still outside clothes not allowed in bed according to Eddie, past and present. Take that, Billy Crystal.

(The image of Eddie pulling off first Richie's shirt and then his own, one handed, in a terrifyingly fluid movement is going to be soldered into his eyelids forever.)

But it's not like Richie is thinking the same thing; he's not panicking, really, and he's definitely not gonna run away and make it weird and draw things out and whatever. That was stupid—even _Richie_ knows that was stupid—but he sorta gets it now. He has the urge to do the Richie equivalent (a bad joke about a certain someone's mother, no doubt) just to _do_ something, and it definitely shows on his face, not that Eddie wouldn't be able to tell anyway probably, he's always weirdly insightful right when Richie doesn't want him to be, but—

"Stop thinking," Eddie says, and his voice is clear but low as he rubs his face into Richie's shirt.

"I'm not," Richie answers reflexively. Eddie snorts. "Shut up."

With another half-laugh, Eddie scooches up and touches Richie's cheek until he turns, finally face-to-face. It's so much worse like this; with his hair rumpled (Richie did that, Richie's hands, in partnership with static electricity and viewers like you thank you) and his eyes enormous, Eddie is a public menace.

And then he not-so-softly pokes the space between Richie's eyebrows and what is Richie supposed to do, not fall in love with him all over again? As if.

"Stop _over_ thinking then," Eddie says, giving his concerned wrinkle one last poke before moving on to the rest of his forehead. "If I'm not even doing it, you're fine. Leave it to the professionals."

Bootleg Garfield stares balefully up at Richie from between their bodies as if to say, _Seriously, not even_ Eddie. _Get it together, man_. Richie thinks absently that Bootleg Garfield might sound how he thinks grownup Stan did.

Richie can only drag his eyes up as far as Eddie's nose before he starts to unravel. He knows if he meets Eddie's eyes he'll go completely transparent, like one of those kitschy phones made of clear plastic so everyone can see the colored wires all twisted up inside, and that's still terrifying, no matter how wonderful everything else is.

"It's weird if neither of us is freaking out."

"No it's not." Richie raises his eyebrow, the one now under Eddie's thumb, and Eddie's mouth quirks before adding, "I love you."

And Richie thinks, _Oh._

Richie thinks, _Sure_.

Richie thinks nothing at all, just feels a rightness rise around him like water filling a bathtub: not forceful like the tide coming in or anything but sort of... suddenly there. Like he was in it the entire time and Richie's the frog in boiling water.

He looks up and finally sees the quiet solidity in Eddie's eyes. "So... no freaking out?"

"Yep."

When the tiny puff of air from the last letter hits Richie's face seconds later he laughs, and Eddie laughs, and Richie feels his face split open like his heart already has, somehow grinning with his mouth closed, which he didn't think was possible before now.

His head falls until the top of it is pressed to Eddie's forehead, their faces perpendicular. With his eyes closed and a quiet seriousness he also didn't know he had, Richie concedes, "Okay."

"Okay," Eddie says, just as soft and sincere, before he pulls Richie back up to face him. "Okay."

He kisses under Richie's eye, bonesolid and careful. Richie realizes then that it's not the slow ticking ceiling fan that's making his face feel cool but tears that have unknowingly escaped the corners of his eyes. It should be embarrassing (it still is, in an abstract way) but Eddie doesn't say a word as he kisses him again on the temple, moves Richie onto his back again, and settles back on top of him, and it's all... okay.

Eddie's love is a living thing. It eats and breathes, heart pumping and alive; it wants and takes and gives all on its own, not asking for permission, just... Being. It _is_. It's a fact of the universe and it wants and it creates and it consumes and it _sees_ things, it takes in the whole world and the whole Richie and still it says, _Of course I'm for you, who else would it be? Who else would I keep all this wanting for? Why wouldn't I give it to you?_

It's a lot of responsibility. He wants to be someone worthy of Eddie's love, even as he knows, objectively, that as far as Eddie's concerned he already is. He wants to— He knows he can't fix things for Eddie, that he has to do that himself, but Richie doesn't want to make things worse. He's rolling up to this... _relationship_ with a lot of baggage of his own, and he just wants to make things easy, because even if accepting that Eddie loves him is miraculously effortless, what follows will certainly not be.

"You're still freaking out, aren't you?" Eddie mumbles into the side of Richie's head. Then, before Richie can argue, he self-corrects. "Or, not freaking out, but like... processing."

"Yeah." He doesn't know when or how his voice got that unused kind of rust, but it creaks out of his throat with more emotion than he'd like. It fills the space between their heads with too much too-much-ness, a molasses sludge like cartoon bad coffee, and Richie resists the urge to curl in on himself like that'll stop the need from bleeding out of him.

But. Always but. Eddie doesn't say anything, like he hears all this thinking through, like he knows too well what's going on in Richie's head. He can't possibly, sure, unless he's suddenly psychic, but he still moves slowly and sure, hands on Richie's wrists and eyes already waiting to be met. There's something comforting about the way Eddie leans back and over, his whole face sliding back into view, thankfully unchanged. Richie doesn't know why he was expecting it to be different—he's always been afraid that by wanting or fearing something he'll will it into or out of existence, and for good reason, it turns out—but he was. And yet...

And yet.

He wasn't, really. Some part of him has always known that even at his worst, at his most self- and non-self-destructive, there's nothing he could ever do to stop the immovable force, unstoppable object that is Eddie Kaspbrak. Nothing he said was ever enough to drive Eddie away, nothing too gross or too soft or too Richie to change Eddie's mind if he didn't want changing. There was never anything Richie could do _to_ Eddie that Eddie wasn't already _letting_ him do. He's still putting those pieces together with the long historical record of his (what he still insists was) totally transparent crush, but even that, that surety, watching a head turn and already knowing _it's you, it's you, of course it's you_ , makes the clamoring in his chest settle. Eddie's heart is both a compass and magnetic north, pointing the way forward and tugging Richie along, steadfast and true and all other associated adjectives. Like Wooly Willy (joke here), iron and magnet. Eddie pulls things into place by being.

"So you... love me," Richie says eventually.

Eddie wiggles his head glibly like _I know, embarrassing_ , but it falls apart immediately and he smiles a small but genuine smile. "Mhm."

Then he drags one finger lightly down Richie's forehead, over the little flat bit of his nose that's still crooked from eighth grade kickball, to rest lightly in the divot over his lips. Holding Richie's bewildered gaze the entire time, Eddie casually slips his hand around to rest against Richie's cheek. He just _smiles_ at Richie, so plainly, and Richie wants to tell him everything, but...

But what?

"Oh," Richie says, casually as all get out. "I love you too."

"I know."

Something swims up in Richie's chest, pleasant and warm like seawater. He slides his hand down in Eddie's grasp to tangle their fingers together and squeezes so Eddie squeezes back, the warmth slowly filling his extremities. Eddie tilts their noses together and squeezes back like he knows because he does.

It's probably the best, the most _good_ Richie has ever felt, and it's serious and monumental in its own way, but he can't help it: the joke is right there, and he wouldn't be Richie Tozier if he didn't take every easy out handed to him.

Pressing closer to Eddie's stubbling cheek, he lingers another beat in the rare calm before murmuring, "Well, your worship, looks like you managed to keep me around for a little while longer."

"What?" Eddie asks, genuinely confused for only a moment before he rolls off of Richie. "No. _No_. Fuck you—"

"Oh come on—"

" _You're_ Princess Leia."

"No y _ou're_ Princess Leia."

"I am not—"

Richie drops into semi-serious mode. "Eddie, come on, obviously you're Leia."

"What, you think you're cool and badass enough to be Han Solo?"

"No, I think you're small and caustic enough to— Mfph."

"Shut _up_." Eddie hits him with Richie's pillow. "Scruffy looking nerf herder."

" _See?_ " Richie weathers a few more blows before taking the pillow back easily and hugging it to his chest. The dopiness of his smile is extreme enough to pass off as glib. "I'm foreseeing a lot of roleplay in our future."

"If that _ever_ happens I will shoot myself," Eddie says, but still he folds his arms and props his chin up on Richie's pillow.

Richie can't help it. Once freed, his hands reach up of their own accord, one to rest on Eddie's back and one to gently card through his hair. It's not a complete surprise when Eddie leans into it, but his heart still stutters. "Come on, admit it, sometimes you think I'm alright," he says.

Right on cue, Eddie fires back, "Maybe. Sometimes. When you aren't acting like a fucking moron."

"That's not how it goes!" Richie says with palpable delight. "That's not the line!"

"It's eighty percent of the line," Eddie hedges belligerently, and Richie doesn't argue, knowing he definitely did the actual math.

Besides, it doesn't matter. Absolutely nothing matters when, even while ostensibly shoving him away, Eddie crowds into Richie's space like he's got the last lungful of air on the planet.

(Which, of course, he would gladly give, and they would pass it back and forth until they collapsed onto each other, their bodies breaking down until all that was left was their bones in a single, indivisible heap.)

Richie kisses the corner of his eyebrow, then his nose when it scrunches in response. Eddie laughs in some full-throated burst of unironic and unfiltered joy that goes immediately to Richie's head. He kisses Eddie again and again in quick little bursts, racking them up like he could get the vaudeville hook at any moment. Even when Eddie pauses to toss aside the pillow between them, Richie is kissing his shoulder, his arms, whatever's in reach.

But maybe it's not that desperate; maybe it's something better. Not a fear of losing something but a hope for something more. It feels like it should feel too good to be true, but it doesn't. It feels right. Richie's gonna get a huge cramp in his neck from the acute angle it takes to reach Eddie's face where it's lying a few inches too far down his chest, but it's right.

Then he's finally kissing Eddie again, trying not to think about how it will always be "again" from now on. He has to _do_ something, something more concrete than words to show how much he feels, in what direction (forward, always forward), so he pushes forward until they're rolled onto their sides. Eddie hums encouragingly and keeps them plastered together until he's tilting back, dragging Richie's head down so he can kiss his forehead.

"I knew you were gonna say that," Eddie says, lips buzzing against Richie's skin. "The easiest, most basic Star Wars reference. Such a loser."

"That's my name, don't wear it out." Richie kisses Eddie's chin like a stamp. Then, after a moment, he adds, "Like you're any better."

Eddie hums again, fiddling fondly with Richie's collar and skipping a few crucial yet easily extrapolated thoughts when he says, "Mr and Mr Loser."

Jesus, like a dagger to the heart, a cattle prod to the brain. Richie might pass out and would if he didn't know those four words affected Eddie as much; with his palm over Eddie's heart, it's impossible to miss how his pulse picks up, but in some ways it's worse to know that despite his body's response, he still said it.

When Eddie holds his face in both hands, Richie feels small in a way he never has, not even as a kid. He feels... precious. Cared for. Treasured. Like something in the hands of a collector, held up to the light and examined but not judged, maybe even wanted all the more for the nicks and flaws that make him unique. Eddie holds him like something worth keeping close and Richie goes where he leads.

"I'm not freaking out," Richie says, incredulous like it's only occurring to him as the words are leaving his mouth.

"That's good," Eddie says very politely.

Richie shuffles down until his face is level with Eddie's chest and wraps his arms around his middle. The smell of hotel soap and Richie's own laundry detergent and clothes-kept-in-a-bag-too-long mustiness fill his head as he breathes in and in, committing it all to memory. Above him he can feel Eddie's smile pressed into the top of his head as arms wrap around his shoulders to tug him even closer.

They lie there quietly, not asleep but resting comfortably. Richie knows that at least on his side it's only partially because he can't with Eddie touching him like this; there's also a bone-deep contentment that momentarily banishes all the aches and exhaustion of the hours before. He doesn't feel tired anymore, he feels sated and whole and content: three things Richie Tozier has never been.

He thinks about what comes next. It's only barely afternoon, the rest of the day is still ahead of them, and even more pressingly, the outside world waits for no man. Eddie's married—which Richie honestly can't believe hasn't come up yet, though he's not exactly complaining—and Richie still has to deal with the fallout of the publicly disastrous few minutes between Mike's call and the first flight out of proverbial Dodge, let alone what he fears/hopes/knows comes (out) next.

They're different people from who they were the last time each other, and in some ways Richie is grateful for that (teenage Richie sucked) but he knows it won't be easy. It'll be a lot of work, but that fact doesn't repel Richie like it usually does. He _wants_ it—that seemingly directionless, all-encompassing craving he's always had lunges forward at the thought and begs to get to build a life with and around Eddie so loudly he's surprised the man himself can't hear it.

Richie slowly scrambles up on his side until he's face to face with Eddie. He's not surprised to see he's also still awake but he _is_ grateful. He needs to see Eddie's eyes. He's looking for something, he doesn't know what, but something reassuring—or, not reassuring, but familiar, something like what he's feeling.

When he gets there, though, he realizes he doesn't need it. He already knows. Eddie holds his gaze until he leans in, and when he kisses Eddie's forehead he stays there for a long time.

The solemn tension doesn't break until there's Ben's voice at the door saying they were all going to meet downstairs in a few minutes and get breakfast for lunch since they were underground at the actual time, and—

He's just so _Ben_ about it, with the unassuming "Hey guys..." and his polite little knock, that Eddie starts silently laughing. When it becomes audible he hides his face in the pillow by Richie's neck, but it's too little too late and _Richie_ is left holding the bag called responsibility.

"Sure, Haystack, that sounds great." Eddie's lips brush Richie's neck when he curls in further on himself and it tickles. "Hell yeah, pancakes and—" Eddie does it again on purpose. "Bacon, pfft, Eds, _stop_."

When Eddie buzzes his lips against Richie's jaw, he laughs and tries to push him away. This quickly devolves into some middle-aged simulacrum of childish wrestling in which they shove each other around on top of the sheets, still laughing.

Behind the door, Ben clears his throat and they both still. "So, is that a yes...?"

"Yeah, we'll be there in a second, Ben," Eddie calls out from under Richie's shoulder, and they both fall back into laughter.

"Okay then," Ben says, bright and indulgent, "see you downstairs."

Their laughter peters out warmly as Ben's footsteps retreat down the hall. Eddie presses a kiss under Richie's jaw before pushing him back, rolling out from under Richie and off the bed entirely. Richie averts his eyes until they both have pants on because he's a gentleman and also because he might finally lose his mind if he has to watch Eddie actual Kaspbrak climb out of his bed half-dressed.

He might also lose it if he doesn't watch, though, so he sneaks a peek before following. He catches the moment where Eddie, holding both his own shirt and the sweatshirt he actually did forget here earlier, thank you very much, drops the former in favor of zipping the sweatshirt partway over Richie's stupid, stupid Garfield shirt. Richie's starting to think the reason he never threw that thing away when it got too small and, in fact, kept taking it with him everywhere is so Eddie could be wearing it now.

Eddie looks up quick enough to catch Richie's stare and gets that deer-in-the-headlights look before flushing. He folds his arms, daring Richie to say something, so Richie leans over and smooths down Eddie's hair (with his entire palm, to make it passably silly). It's still a miracle to know Eddie's not indulging Richie's touch but actively pursuing it; he tilts his head up into the touch as Richie spreads his fingers lightly across his scalp, picking up each sticky-up piece and setting it in place.

When he's finished, Richie twists a piece around until there's one weird curl in the middle of his forehead. "Superman."

Eddie smiles and brushes it back in with the rest before reaching up to tap the bridge of Richie's glasses. "Clark Kent."

He's not gonna cry, he's not gonna cry—it's stupid, Bill liked DC, their thing was X-Men—except Eddie tucks his thumb under Richie's glasses and oh, he already is.

But Eddie's expression doesn't change, like it's no big deal, and it soothes the stupid monster that lives in the gaping hole (ha) in Richie's psyche and exists only to hunger. Nothing's ever really done that before, not sober, and so out of his mouth falls, "I love you."

"See?"

Eddie doesn't say what, but Richie does see, even as Eddie leans in and his eyes slip shut. The world didn't end, the building didn't collapse, the floor didn't open up beneath him and drop them both back in the sewers or an open grave or just regular ol' Hell (though the thought pales in comparison to what they've been through). No one burst into flames or ran for the hills. Sure, Richie cried some, but Eddie did too, so it's a moot point.

Before Eddie steps back to tie his shoes, he grabs Richie's hand and kisses where their scars used to be: the hand whose blood was on Eddie's cast forever and ever. It's smooth, now, but that's okay. He has something much better to remind him instead.

The thought reverberates lowly when it pings off something in the recesses of his mind.

"Hey, before we go," he says as Eddie pulls on his second shoe, "there's something I wanna show you."

Eddie stops to give him and then the bed a wary look. "Everybody's waiting."

"I mean before we leave Derry." Richie rolls his eyes as he pulls on the boots Ben had so graciously lent him while they were doing triage for the laundromat[14] and his own sweet kicks didn't make the cut. He should probably mention the ridiculous amount of cash in his bag, pay Eddie back for his quarters and Mike back for twenty-odd years of life. "Why does everyone always assume I'm talking about my dick?"

Eddie rolls his eyes and yanks open the door.

"I've known you for over thirty years, asshole. Besides, your entire career is based on talking about your dick."

"Not all of it, just the parts that are true."

"Good to know." Eddie snorts, then shakes his head. "God, even when I didn't remember you, I knew that." He turns to look Richie dead in the eyes as he adds, "You never left me alone."

Richie swallows around the lump in his throat and cracks a grin. "Eddie my love, I would annoy you 'til the end of time if you'd let me."

"Aw, you say the sweetest things," Eddie simpers, but his eyes say he means it and Richie doesn't know what to do other than believe him.

"Or." Richie locks the room behind them, trying not to think about how Eddie has left exactly space between him and the doorway for one Richie and no more. "Is this a reverse psychology thing, like you think it'll make me want to tell you about my dick more if you act like you hate hearing about it? Cuz babe, if you wanted to see my dick, you know all you had to do was ask."

Eddie rolls his eyes again, which is more lethal up close. "I refuse to have sex with you for the first time in Derry."

Though they can hear the muffled sound of the other Losers gathered in the entry hall, something about the empty hallway makes Richie have no qualms about looming over Eddie as he is. Probably it's the implication that Eddie wants to have sex with him at some point, and that he's confident enough to say so out loud in the hallway.

"I don't know, it's kinda fitting. Full circle and shit."

Eddie lightly punches his arm and takes off down the hall. "Fucking _Derry_ , Rich. Absolutely not."

"You didn't care two hours ago," Richie points out, following his invisible tether. "What, did you suddenly grow principles while we were in there and I didn't notice?"

He pats Eddie down wherever he can reach and bounces back unperturbed when Eddie, grinning, stops momentarily to flap at him over his shoulder.

"I can't be held responsible for my actions under the influence," Eddie says haughtily.

"Unless you're talking about the influence of merely some wholesome good loving..."

Still walking, Eddie swats him again, smiling even more. Richie lets him, privately marveling over the wonder of Eddie Kaspbrak being dick drunk _for him_. "Sleep deprivation is proven to have effects on judgment comparable to drunkenness."

"We just had naptime, man, it's not my fault you didn't get your z's."

"It's actually pretty much exclusively your fault," Eddie smirks, falling back so they're face to face when Richie blushes. "So."

Richie slides his glasses up his nose—uselessly, since they're already as high up as they can get. Eddie is still looking at him, but it doesn't make Richie nervous so much as excited. Still, he defaults to, "Careful there, Eds, people might start thinking you _like_ me or something."

Eddie spins to pin Richie against the wall just before the stairs. His tongue is in Richie's mouth immediately, his hands on Richie's shoulder and jaw to keep him right where Eddie wants him. He's already efficient at taking Richie apart, knee insistent between Richie's as the hand on his shoulder skates down over his chest. Richie's head thunks against the wall as he moans as quietly as he can, his mouth still sealed shut by Eddie's.

And then he's gone as quickly as he arrived, just far enough that he can keep his hands on Richie. While Richie tries to find his breath and remaining brain cells, Eddie tips his head maybe twenty degrees, enough to make the full body look he gives Richie absolutely smoldering despite its quickness.

"I _love_ you," Eddie says, eyes sparking.

It zaps through Richie's body like lightning through a cartoon character, illuminating his skeleton. Eddie's hand brushes lightly over Richie's cheek but he barely feels it, every inch of his skin fuzzy like a freshly turned-off TV. He would jam a fork in a socket every day if it kept Eddie looking at him like this.

"I love you too."

"If you two Losers are done up there," Bev's voice rises from the lobby as Eddie grabs Richie's hand and squeezes, "I'd like to eat in the next twenty-seven years."

"Fuck you, Bev," Eddie calls down.

He tugs Richie's hand as he heads for the stairs and, although he drops it to grab the railing, Richie follows anyway, throwing out his own wild-eyed, "Yeah, fuck you, Bev!"

Bev fires back as Richie leans over the railing, looking down at their waiting mass friends as they bounding down to meet them. On their way he gets in one last, sappy thought before popping their two-seater romance bubble: that while they don't have sex, Richie thinks (even as a distant part of him is gagging) they maybe make love. Maybe they remake love every minute.

That's a nice thought.

* * *

14 Eddie said they should burn it all. Richie, without thinking, said he liked this shirt in small, sad-ish tone. Eddie caved immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're here! we finally made it! holy shit, gang, we really took the long way round on this, but we finally made it to the end! this has been a weird journey; I started writing this fic at a real high in my life but only started posting it this may when the world was going to shit and tbh it's really been the thing that's kept me together. I've been looking through the wips I started last year when I watched ch 2 (EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO TODAY! wasn't even the real thing, it was the shitty cam version on p*tlocker that was missing a solid five minutes in the beginning lmao, but I was not going to go out in public knowing my own reaction to eddie and stan's deaths lmao) and it's got me all inspired again, so I'm not going anywhere, but also I've put so much into this fic and I can really feel that distance. I am refreshed! I am renewed! I'm also writing my thesis on this book so I'm definitely not going fucking anywhere lmao
> 
> and I do just want to say thank you to everyone who's been reading. it's been a while since I wrote for such an active fandom and it was kind of demoralizing ngl, but you guys have all really propelled me forward with your kind words and your emo screaming and I appreciate it so so much.
> 
> no more real notes! everything's in here. it's all wrapped up.... :'(
> 
> oh, wait! richie's garfield shirt is based on one my mom has, though it's calvin and hobbes. garfield seemed more stan, though. there's also a scene that's incidentally another homage to west wing but if you get that I will genuinely give you my house, it's a bit of a deep, innocuous cut lol

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! like and subscribe etc, let me know what you think below—I've been working on this so long it'd be nice to hear what other people think of it
> 
> don't forget to read the second part [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24397549)! updates alternating w/ this
> 
> title from "[this must be the place](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsccjsW8bSY)" by talking heads, featured on [the soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2BtKmmnoStrAHl4xw10ZRy), which has every epigraph and reference present and future.
> 
> tumblr @[lamphous](http://lamphous.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @[Iamphouse](http://twitter.com/Iamphouse)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [make it up as we go along (vol. 1)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24397549) by [lamphouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamphouse/pseuds/lamphouse)




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